Today we take on a common misleading tactic that startups use thinking it sounds impressive. That is the lie that you built your business with no marketing.

The most common reason for this lie is simple, it smacks of inexperience in the startup world. It also means that you don’t understand what marketing is and how to do it. That’s a bad thing to put out there. On today’s episode we tell you why this tactic doesn’t work and what you should be doing to make a great pitch.

Topics we discussed today:

The “no marketing lie”

Resources Mentioned:

The Startup Chat  045: Founder Self Awareness – The Weight of Your Words

The Startup Chat  065: How to Become More Self-Aware

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.

Hiten Shah:  Absolutely. Hi, this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:  And this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:  And today on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how many founder startups even after they’ve raised a whole bunch of money still claim that they do know marketing and they’ve gotten all their customers doing no marketing. So, Steli, how do we feel about this?

Steli Efti:  We feel that that’s a huge pile of bullshit, right?

Hiten Shah:  Nice. Yeah.

Steli Efti:  That’s really what it is. And I was just at a startup conference where, you know, every single fucking startup that was pitching at the slight retraction, whatever the hell the numbers were, one way or another, they were basically saying, “And we accomplished all these numbers with no marketing,” which just drove me crazy because it’s just bullshit. What do you mean no marketing? Right?

Hiten Shah:  I just—I just typed in marketing. Can I like just—

Steli Efti: Yes.

Hiten Shah:  Can I just like go there and just be like “All right, what is marketing here?”

Steli Efti:  Yes, please, let’s do that.

Hiten Shah:  I’m going to define this thing. It’s going to take probably 10 seconds. The management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. It includes a coordination of 4 elements called the 4 P’s of marketing—product, price, place, promotional strategy. And what’s beautiful is—when they say product, they literally have written identification, selection and development of a product. Then it’s determination of its price, then it’s selection of a distribution channel that reach the customer’s place and then it’s development and implementation of a promotional strategy. And I’m going to end that one with an example.

For example, new Apple products are developed to include improved applications and systems, are set at different prices depending on how much capability the customer desires and are sold in places where other Apple products are sold. So they included all the, you know, product, price, place, promotional strategy all in there in that one paragraph all about Apple’s marketing. So, if you are doing anything in a company, you’re probably doing marketing.

When you are a non-engineer founder communicating with engineers is essential, but it can also be tricky.  On this episode we talk about each of our backgrounds in working with engineers in the early days of our businesses, lessons learned and some best practices in working with engineers when you don’t have an engineering background.

The relationship between founders and engineers often relies on the ability to effectively communicate with each other, both in providing information and having a level of understanding on what’s being said to you so that you can use that information in practical ways.  

Our best practices guidelines include:

What it means to being open to the engineering mindset

For their final tips, Steli thinks it would be helpful for you to find an “engineering coach” who is somebody who may have that engineering background and as a friend can guide you in working with engineers when you most need it and Hiten discusses how pretending the engineer you are communicating with is a friend you already know can give you a different perspective.

Resources Mentioned:

The Startup Chat Episode 91: Leadership vs Management

Paul Graham: Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

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 108: How to Work With Engineers appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Many of our listeners ask us lots of questions. One of the common questions we get is how to cope with stress in terms of business. So on today’s episode we try to give you some perspective on stress.

No matter how hard you think something is, or was, you need to compare it to something that has already happened. The bottom line is your 7 or 8 on the stress scale is more like a 2 or a 3 compared to another set of problems.

We offer these points below to help cope:

Why you should write down the issue

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 107: How to Manage Startup Stress appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today we talk about the importance of keeping an eye on your company’s churn numbers. Churn is a term used for the loss of something. There are different types of churn, but today we are going to focus on customer churn. Every business has churn, but an enterprise business should deal with churn differently, than a SaaS business. Today we’ll focus on SaaS business.

We share our tips and takeaways from working with churn numbers. Churn is something a company wants to get a grip on early on in the business. We tell you how to go about that as well as other aspects to keep in mind.

The topics we covered today are:

Why customer churn is important

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 106: How to Deal With Churn in SaaS appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

A lot of startups use travel as a means to team build or as an incentive to sales teams. Today we discuss how travel is beneficial to your business. We also discuss the pros and cons of planning a business retreat for remote teams meet-ups. Hiten doesn’t have company travel trips, but Steli has about 2 a year.

Team travel is great for remote teams who wouldn’t meet each other any other time. Steli shares why he and his team take their trips and how they go about it. This year they plan to have a team trip to Berlin. Steli gives us an insight into traveling with a team, maybe it will help you plan for the next meet-up or encourage you to go meet some distant clients.

Some of the tips Steli mentions today are below:

How to use team trips for larger conversations

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 105: How to Grow a Distributed Startup Team & Travel (A Lot) appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

We have noticed that when we speak with listeners of the podcast, there are some who expect us to give them a kick. That has made us consider what we need to do to give you a kick through the podcast.

During today’s episodes we trade ideas and possible reasons why our listeners are stalling their actions. Hopefully we’re able to help you guys get some fire back and get out there and do it!

The points we come up with today are:

Why people tend to not take action

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 104: How to Take Action appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

We share and compare our public speaking styles in this episode as we help each other dissect our styles and look at the good and the bad. So many people think a presentation has to be polished, however maybe we’ll be able to change some minds on that.

The most important ingredient of a good talk is genuineness. We offer some tips on how to do that and give the maximum value possible.

The topics we talked about:

Why people love Steli’s speaking style

Resources mentioned today:

Steli’s talk at Pioneers Festival 2013

The Startup Chat Feedback on Feedback episode

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 103: Public Speaking Tips to Wow Your Audience appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Part of growing a business is hiring people to take over and continue work that is already being done. We are often asked when a founder should train someone else to do work they were previously doing. Our answer is collectively “Trust your people to do the work.” Today we discuss how to trust your staff to do the work and still meet your standards.

The points we talked about today are:

How to become “an editor”

Transitioning out of a job is a hard growing process for any founder, and any company. We hope today’s episode will help with that transition.

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 102: Trusting Others to Do the Work / When to Hire People to Scale Yourself appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Sometimes a person from a work team will leave the company. Today we tell you how we deal with employees who want to leave or are just considering it. Adjusting to an employee change has its process.

Today we talk about the emotions involved, the lessons that can be learned in the situation, and how to deal with the remaining staff. Employees who are moving on can show you where the issues are in your company. An employee departure also can help you work with the team to make them ready to work without the leaving member.

The topics we covered today are:

The emotional swings that happen after the announcement

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 101: What to Do When Someone Leaves appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today’s topic is how to make meetings more meaningful.  Hiten has, on average, 25 meetings a week. We both have many requests for our time and advice.  As we take a look at the role meetings play in our lives, we both feel that the most important meetings are those where we can add value.  There are a number of ways to look at structuring meetings and finding the best ways to share information and ideas.

We break today’s episode into discussing two types of meetings, the external meetings we have with people who are often looking for advice and internal meetings involving members of our teams.

Topics discussed involving external meetings:

The best ways to use email to respond to determine if a meeting should occur

Topics covered dealing with internal meetings:

The two most common types of team meetings - update meetings and brainstorming meetings and how we do both types

Resources:

The Startup Chat Episode 094: What to Do When Moving to Silicon Valley

Slack

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 100: How to Make Meetings More Meaningful appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.