In this episode, Steli and Hiten discuss “what to do when people screw you over.” Partners, investors, clients—there is always an opportunity for misunderstandings and conflict.  The important question to ask is: how do you respond when you feel like someone is taking advantage of you?  Steli and Hiten offer up tips and solutions based from real-life experiences.  They discuss the importance of knowing and owning your side of the conflict, understanding the other’s point of view, and how to take action.  

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:30 – “What to do when people screw you over?” in the business sense

Today Steli and Hiten are talking about Hiten’s new book The Content Marketing Playbook.  This is a very specific deep dive into the years of experience Hiten has gained from building content marketing programs at Kissmetrics, and with his personal brand helping startups.

A lot of people think that content marketing is ‘just blogging’, but Hiten quickly dispels that myth.  In fact their beginnings of content marketing at Kissmetrics was on Twitter.

Through this lesson Hiten developed a highly targeted framework for approaching content marketing.  Ask yourself these three questions to help you define and connect with your ideal customers:

Who are your customers?

In addition to creating great content you can also be a curator of great content. This was the breakthrough Hiten found with Kissmetrics where they became an authority for sharing great content around measurable marketing analytics.

The top of the funnel is the weak spot in most businesses, and building the audience that you can send to your content is key.  If nobody is visiting your site then the best blog post in the world isn’t going to deliver any value.  That’s why Hiten likes building an audience, getting involved with your target audience, and then delivering value to them.

Communities like Hacker News, Inbound.org, and Growth Hackers can be great places to share great content, pose interesting questions, and communicating what you’re learning right now.  Curating other people’s great content in these communities is an easy way to get started and frame your perspective, both without creating a ton of you own original content.

Tips

Hiten: Just copying a competitor isn’t going to differentiate your brand. That mental space is taken by the established player.  Don’t just copy, iterate and find your angle to build a brand on top of.

Steli: When looking at others’ marketing content ask yourself ‘What You Like’, and ‘What’s Missing that could make this Great’.

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

The post 158: The Content Marketing Playbook appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten discuss Steli's posts on Facebook which address the topic of worrying. In this current season of presidential elections, a lot of people have been openly posting their thoughts, concerns, and fears online. Listen as Steli shares what he believes about worrying and discover his message to those wrestling with such concerns.  

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:33 – Steli reads his post on the topic of worrying

3 Key Points:

Stop worrying about the things you cannot control; instead, ACT!

Resources Mentioned:

Steli’s Facebook Post – The topic of this episode

Steli Efti: Hey, everyone. This is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about something that Steli posted and it was about “worrying”. And he posted it last week, when a lot of interesting things were happening in the world. And so, I think Steli’s got it open. So he’s going to read it and then we’re going to jump right in.

Steli Efti: Yeah. So, here’s what I posted:

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its troubles, it empties today of its strength. Stop worrying and start acting. What can you do today to make the world a little better?

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how to go from 100 customers to 1000—how to focus, what to zero-in on, and how to intelligently approach the next phase of scale and growth. Listen as they highlight the power of grouping and segmentation, and why clearing 100 customers means it’s time to earn an intimate understanding of customer acquisition cost.  

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:30 – Steli introducing today’s topic and why they’re covering it

02:22 – This is high-volume SaaS

02:40 – Measuring the metrics isn’t really meaningful until you cross the 100 customer milestone

03:30 – Grouping your customers can help you get a better idea of what type of customers you are getting from specific channels

05:39 – Segmentation includes the size of the customers, buying percentage, and geography

08:33 – There are a lot of KPIs that you can track

10:12 – Some SaaS business that are crossing the 100 customer mark are using Stripe, Braintree, and other paid online tool

10:30 – ProfitWell integrates with a lot of systems and gives you data off the shelf. It is also free

10:54 – Average revenue per user, churn rate, MRR, and how MRR is broken down on a monthly basis

11:30 – Having a tool is basic and critical

12:34 – “Once you cross the 100 mark, that is the right time to look at the numbers”

14:10 – Having that 100 customer mark may lead you to get more people in marketing and sales

16:10 – Most people focus on marketing channels selection and implementation without actually verifying if that channel will work or not

16:58 – Marketing generalists are more difficult to find than marketing specialists

17:20 – Find new channels and start experimenting

17:48 – “Look at what you’re doing , break it down, and understand your process”

17:56 – The process of blogging

18:33 – Force yourself to calculate and understand your customer acquisition cost

22:45 – The people you won’t want to take in are senior sales people like a VP of sales

25:05 – As a founder, you need to involve yourself in every aspect of the compan...

On today’s episode we’re going to talk about the value of thinking small. Recently we had a session at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco, and it turned out to be a rather intimate affair. We don’t mind small crowds, but there are businesses out there who would find a small turn out (less than 15 people) distressing.

During this episode we’re going to tell you why having small projects that don’t have this massive audience can actually be a good thing. We tell you how starting small is a good way to connect with your audience. Always be prepared for the massive media success, but when it isn’t there is a cool dynamic change that can make the event special. Our event in San Francisco, may have been small, but it opened up new opportunities for questions most people wouldn’t ask at a larger event. That small event had big value.

Today’s points:

Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli Efti: Hi everyone, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat we’re gonna talk about the value of thinking small. Maybe ways to do things in your business that don’t always scale or have massive reach or impact, and what the value of that is now, and how to think about that in a world where everybody’s just pointing into how do you scale? How do you grow? How do you do things that are impacting as many people as possible? How do you automate things and all that stuff? And the reason why we’re even considering to explore this question is that yesterday we were invited to give – to do a Q & A session of the Startup Chat at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco and it kinda went down in very unexpected ways. Right, Hiten?

Hiten Shah: Yeah, absolutely. We had room for about 40 people and we got there – Steli was about five minutes late because of traffic and Uber and all that stuff from South Bay. I was about right on time after finding some parking and I walked in the room – the elevator was full. There was like five, six people. I didn’t know what to expect of how many people were gonna be there. I had a feeling there weren’t going to be as many just from the vibe that I got. But, then I walked in and we literally had less than about 15 people in the room. And yeah, we – Steli and I have no problem with that. We roll with it.

One thing we said actually before we started was like, if it was just the two of us, that’s great. We would’ve turned on the recorder and just went for it and it would’ve been fine. But, there were 15 people in the room and we actually decided not to record it and had a – I think Steli, you used this word when you were describing it to your family. But, it was the word intimate and it was a very intimate sort of experience. And we didn’t record it unfortunately – or fortunately and we got into a lot of interesting topics that we’re not gonna share just because it was very intimate and t...

In business the number one reason people don’t pull their triggers is fear. Everyone has fear of failure, even people who have lots of successes in their businesses. Nobody ever really gets over it. On today’s The Startup Chat we discuss how to move past fear and change your thinking.

Today’s points of our conversation:

Why you need to face fear head on.

If you want some resources for how to overcome your fear shoot us an email and we’ll be glad to hook you up!

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli: Hey, everyone. This is Steli Efti.

Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. And on today’s episode we're going to talk about the fear of failure and how to get over it. And I'm going to hand it off to Steli because he really wanted to talk about this, and I think it was based on an experience he had recently.

Steli: Yeah. So yesterday I was speaking at an event. And then at the end of the – it was a Q&A session, an interview session on stage. At the end of it, there were a lot of people that were asking great questions, so I had a lot of fun. And the last question that was asked, that person basically said: hey, Steli thanks for sharing all this stuff, blah, blah, bah. It seems like you have figured out a way to not be afraid of failure anymore. It seems like you had lots of failures and you’ve overcome that. And you’ve preserved through it and now you’re successful.

And it seems like the fear of rejection, the fear of failure is something that you’ve learned to leave behind you, and you’ve kind of grown beyond. How did you do that because I'm still terrified and afraid to fail? And I was so grateful for that question. It was a very honest one. It's an uncomfortable question to ask, especially the way – with the level of honesty that he asked that question. But I was not just happy that he asked about fear of failure, because I think this is such a huge thing, and that I would share some of my experiences and learning there.

But I was glad that he asked in the way that he did because it gave me an opportunity to clarify something. The first thing that I said and responded to is that I am still afraid to fail. And I don't like rejection, and I don’t like failure. And I'm sometimes bummed that I can come across as if I am this person that has gone beyond this, and that I don’t have these emotions. I'm very sensitive to lots of people like us Hiten that have a lot of visibility, and share a lot of our experiences.

Even people – some people I think are full of bullshit, and full of shit, some people are on a spectrum of more or less authentic in how vulnerable, they share what they truly believe. I know that we both try every day to be as honest and as authentic as we can, and I'm trying to get better at this every day. But I think one of the big problems is that people are listening to people like me on stage, and they get this like misconception that I'm not afraid of fear, afraid of failure anymore and I've gone beyond this. So they're like how can I get there as well,

On today’s The Startup Chat we discuss customer success. This market has become saturated with SaaS tools that are useless and a waste of money. During today’s episode we discuss why customer success is really simpler than the industry would have you believe.

So if you’re considering looking into a customer success tool, just listen to this episode first.

Today’s points of our conversation:

Why Hiten prefers the term “customer support.”

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli: Hey, everyone this is Steli Efti.

Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli: And in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we're going to talk about customer success. What it is, how to think about it, but much more importantly how to make your customers successful, how to retain them, and how to grow your business with your current customers and why that – and how to do that technically. But even before we start jumping into things, I know that you are not the biggest fan of the term customer success. And I want to like kick us off with that controversy and let you comment on that. Why is that a terminology that you're not a huge fan of?

Hiten: Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of that terminology because I'm either old school or grandpa in this case. And the reason I say that – or a curmudgeon – but it's because I'm used to, in my first SAS business Crazy Egg would still exist, not having sales, or what we now call customer success sometimes. And I really believe it's a made up category for sales to co-op to customer support. So that’s my sort of aggressive approach and thinking around it. And so my take is why don’t we just call it customer support.

And why do we have to call it customer success. Because there are also on sales teams, retention teams, and there's account managers, and they should be doing the function of customer success. So my take is that we merged account management in some ways, retention teams and sales with customer support. And now we call it customer success. And there's, you know, just like in many other terms, like you know this whole term of like account based marketing or whatever it's called, or account based sales, I think that’s bullshit, too.

So it's like we're making up these terms. We have really good terms for this stuff, like sales, instead of account based sales or whatever, and customer support instead of customer success. And a lot of these terms are made up because some random SAS company wanted to create a new market, or resegment an existing market and become relevant. And I think the days of that kind of stuff happening are over. And I could say the same about inbound marketing, except that inbound marketing came out at a time when social wasn’t that hot.

And people were doing a lot more paid acquisition in SEO. And inbound marketing ended up combining a lot of these things. So I'm not trying to justify that terminology, but because of the success of some these terms from back in the day, people are making it up. So in my mind,

Customer development is crucial to any startup business. Customer development tells a founder what their customer base really needs. The best tool to get this information is customer interviews.

On today’s The Startup Chat we discuss how to conduct a customer interview. We also explain why founders need to do customer development interviews. Customer development is not about validating an idea. It is solely for the purpose of knowing the customer and coming up with the best solution to their need.

We are going to tell you how to get the ball rolling and what it is you’re looking for in these interviews.

Here are today’s points:

What is customer development?

Tools for Customer Development:

Survey Monkey

Twitter

The 4 Steps to the Epiphany by: Steve Blank

95 Ways to Get Your First Customers

Lean Startup Machine

Create Products that People Love by Validating Your Idea First, by: Hiten Shah

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli Efti: Hey, everyone. This is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah. Today, on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to do customer interviews. These are specifically around what many people call customer development. Before we really jump in, I’ll tell my story about it and how I got excited about it and learned how to do it. Then, I’m sure Steli’s got some thoughts. So I got into this a bunch of years ago. I was accidentally doing it for my first few companies back in … between 2003 and 2008. So for about five years when I think the Sass market and the market for kind of software was much less competitive. I would do a lot of things around customer support asking why to customers when they sort of had problems.

That taught me a lot about software and my business and how to improve it. Fast forward a little bit back to 2008. Basically 2006 onwards, the lead startup movement started happening with Eric Reese blogging a lot about how startups should be created especially as there was a downturn. Everyone had to get more efficient if they wanted to keep running their startup. At that time, customer development came up because a lot of the lead startup principles, the original ones, and a couple of them came from this course on customer development by Steve Blank, who’s a professor at Stanford … and I think Berkeley as well.

He wrote a book back in the day called Four Steps to the Epiphany which was all about this process he called customer development. This customer interview is just one piece of it. But the way I got really great at it is I hired a product manager at Kissmetrics a few years into the company … about a year in actually when we had really figured out the product we wanted to go after in the market. She was … her name is Cindy Alvarez. She actually wrote a book called Lean Customer Development. Her and I would learn a lot together about customer development and customer research,

Today we talk about one of Hiten’s favorite topics, company culture. Business culture is a key factor to keeping your employees invested in your company. So many companies miss the mark on what makes a company culture good.

On today’s The Startup Chat, we discuss what a good company culture is and how to build it. Hiten has been doing some research on this so if you are interested in participating go to bit.ly/culturegood. This is a fun topic that can be very revealing about your business and it’s business practices.

Here’s what we discussed today:

What is company culture?

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

The post 151: How to Create a Winning Startup Culture appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

On today’s The Startup Chat we discuss cold calling. We’ll tell you what cold calling is, why you should do it, and how to do it effectively. Steli is the rock star of cold calling between the two of us. He’ll tell us how he has made cold calling work for him and his business.

Cold calling is a channel that can be effective for your customer base. If you have some worries about cold calling or if you’re wondering if cold calling will work for you, then give this episode a try.  

Here are today’s points:

What is cold calling?

If you are still apprehensive about cold calling, then Steli invites you to email him at [email protected].

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli: Hey, everyone, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten: And this is Hiten Shaw and the Startup Chat and today we’re actually going to talk about cold calling. One reason is, you know, one of us is an expert on this I would say and that happens to be Steli. So I get to ask him a lot of questions about this as he kind of talks about it. So this is almost like a Cold Calling 101, I would say.

Steli: Yeah.

Hiten: I’m sure we will get into some advanced stuff. For context, I’ve had teams where we’ve done a ton of cold calling. My cofounder has a whole bunch of funnels and things like that where there’s a bunch of cold calling, as well as inside sales and things like that going on. Also, you know, one thing I would say before we jump in is, for a SaaS business to scale you have to go outbound, meaning you have to go find a way to email, call prospects, potential customers, people you don’t know yet. This can be for partnership reasons, this can be for sales reasons, and this can be for many other reasons as well. So I’m eager to hear all the cool stuff that you have to share about this topic.

Steli: Yeah, and this has been consistently a topic that listeners have been asking us to talk about. It’s kind of a list of things where people ask us about it and we are experts in but selfishly at times, you know, I’ll admit we’d rather talk about something more fun. We’ll talk about something we DON’T get to talk about every day with each other but this is just one that’s been kind of consistently enough requested that we thought, all right, let’s do one and share as much value as we can on this topic because a lot of founders struggle with this. So I’ll let you ask the questions and I’ll give the best answers I can.

Hiten: Sounds good. So, yeah, cold calling. What is it? Why should we do it?

Steli: Well, cold calling is the act of calling somebody that didn’t expect to hear from you and most of the times it’s also somebody that doesn’t know you or company to service and didn’t consent to, or was aware of, you having his or her contact details. So it’s not calling your friend who didn’t expect the call but it’s calling somebody that doesn’t know you or didn’t know you had their phone number and wasn’t expecting to be contacted by you...