Scale or Die

In this week’s episode, I’m subbing in my good friend and co-founder, Chris Hull. While I’ve been focused on leading the Product Team for our Lifecycle Campaigns product, Chris has been helping lead the launch team for our Smart Content product.

So often in business, we tend to think about things as controllable or non-controllable. But when you launch a product, it can be overwhelming as you think of all the things that are completely out of your control.

At Proof, we have been focusing on what we can control, how we can prepare for launch now, and how we can be flexible when we do finally launch. Our approach during product launch has been to define a controllable outcome and create a process to evaluate that process at regular intervals. Finally, we’ve built a system to get feedback at the end of all this.

Come join us in this episode as we try to “win the launch,” before we launch.

As the growth mind behind Mention, Segment, and Drift, Guillaume Cabane has helped scale some of the most successful B2B brands in the world. In our interview, Guillaume dives into the value of creating new growth strategies rather than just copying what everyone else in the market is doing. We’ll learn about how Guillaume’s network of peers help him evaluate his new ideas and verify different growth strategies before they’re launched to market.

Find out why the future of marketing is less about a spray and pray mentality, but more about creating a great experience. Guillaume is a proponent of looking at the customized personal experiences that B2C companies provide and bringing them into the B2B world. You don’t want to miss this one...

Founder and sales rep? How does that combo sound?

This week I put on my sales hat as we built out a sales process for our 2 new products.

I want to share with you the 3 key thoughts I’ve had while building out our sales process:

1. I’m a huge believer that if you want to learn something fast, hire someone that knows it better than you. So I hired a sales coach!

2. Early in our sales process, we are solely focusing on demos and calls.

3. We purposefully avoided building out a pricing structure.

In this episode, I’ll explain my rationale for each of these decisions as well an update on our progress getting this two products to market. Come on the journey as I share all of my thoughts from the last week.

And as always, reach out to me, [email protected] with what you liked, what you hated, and any questions you have!

I’ve had a product development metamorphosis. Our Proof team is in the middle of a 6-week product launch challenge. And this week is all about product feedback!

In the episode, I will walk you through the entire process we’ve used to approach product feedback calls. I’m going to share with you everything from how we find interviewees and structure up the calls to the questions we ask and how we handle feedback.

Plus, last week I promised to announce the 2 products Proof is launching during this cycle… Drumroll PLEASE!

1) Lifecycle campaigns

2) AI-powered recommended context

Tune in to find out more about these products!

Mathilde Collin is pioneering the fight for radial transparency among SaaS businesses around the globe. Her shared inbox startup, Front, is reinventing email for the way teams work by introducing collaboration, workflows, accountability, and transparency so that every worker can work more efficiently. In 4 short years, Front has grown to over 4700 paying customers including HubSpot, Shopify, and General Assembly.

Find out how transparency has made employees happier at Front (Read Front’s Glassdoor reviews if you don’t believe me), built greater trust within the company, prevented thousands of unnecessary meetings, and created a culture of trust between Front and their customer base.

I’m going to get very vulnerable with you here and share a story of how we missed the mark. We’ve been building a tool to help you create a remarkable website experiences but somewhere along the way we got lost. The product kept swelling, we lost some momentum. And even worse, we lost some morale.

A few weeks ago, we sat down and got honest with ourselves. We looked at the plans for our Experiences platform and realized there were about 10 smaller stand-alone products that could provide tremendous value for our customers. We’d been making the product way too complicated — for no reason!

Over the next 6 weeks, our company is on a product launch challenge called Operation Kickflip.

Before we can build a high-performance race car (our Experiences Platform), we first need to build a skateboard. Then a bike. Then a motorcycle, and finally a car. 2 of these 10 stand-alone products will be in the market in 6 weeks!

Every week, in this special minishow version of Founder Friday, I’ll be updating you on the progress of developing these new products.

Curious about what the 2 new products that we’re launching? Tune in next Friday — or email me, [email protected] and I’ll personally get you on the waitlist.

Doing business with your best friends — does it work? People have strong opinions about never doing business with friends. I disagree. Having a great co-founder relationship has been one of the keys to our success at Proof over the past couple of years.

During our time at Y-Combinator, I noticed one of the prime reasons for early startup deaths was a result of co-founders not getting along. Our co-founder relationship isn’t perfect, but I want to share with you what has worked for us in our relationship. And it doesn’t just stop at the office, but it carries over into our personal lives as well!

Next Monday marks the beginning of Proof Camp — one of my favorite weeks of the year. We host team retreats like this twice per year, and I'm excited to share the full details of how we think about the event.

I'll go over why I think retreats are important, how we make Proof Camp epic, how we balance work & play, and the methods we take to make everyone leave better friends. Hope you like this one!

On the podcast, I've talked a lot about how core values are incredibly important when you're building a business. It's what separates you from competitors, and what attracts people to your mission. Until recently, we had 7 core values and a mission statement I thought were perfect. But as our team grew, I realized we'd made a mistake.

We simply had too many values — and our mission statement was, well, boring. I needed to make a change to more align with our current team and the direction our business is heading. In this episode, I'll explain how my cofounders and I approached changing our values and mission statement, why we did it, and what you can take away for your own company.

I've been golfing for years now. And despite hours and hours of practice & time on the course, I had never shot below 80. It's been frustrating.

This year, in anticipation of a trip to Scotland to golf the Old Course in Scotland with my dad, I decided to change my mentality. I decided to focus on breaking 80. I applied the same thinking that I apply at work to hit goals product blitz after blitz.

By focusing on process rather than outcomes, I hit a 70. In this episode, I'll talk about how to deconstruct a goal & reach outcomes that you couldn't imagine hitting before.