Building the startup flywheel (issue no. 25)
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Founder Education
This section is meant to help you grow as a leader, manager, or entrepreneur.
The Flywheel - HubSpot
HubSpot has announced a new direction for their product strategy. They will be replacing the marketing funnel model with the customer flywheel model.
What I love about this announcement is that is shows how HubSpot is growing and where they see the future of marketing. And I think they’re right.
Most founders (especially in B2C) know that everything starts and ends with your customers. However, we still market to customers with the funnel approach, more to move potential users through the funnel than to actually speak to that customer.
The flywheel model introduces an idea of making all customers thebcenter and always delighting,selling, and marketing to them. This, in effect, brings customer experience, product marketing, integrated sales/marketing into one bubble surrounding the customer.
Link: https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel
Business Strategy
This section is designed to help you improve your skills as a strategist and tactician.
25 tips for managing a virtual team - The Time Doctor
This piece is a great reminder of how intentionality is what predicts the success of a virtual team. As a matter of fact, I’ve run a team virtual and forgotten to perform a more exaggerated form of communication only to find that employees don’t actually take you up on your offer to help.
With 25 tips The Time Doctor covers not just the day to day, but the mindset of an entrepreneur/manager who leads a virtual team. You can have all of the best tech for collaboration, but your team will still underperform if you don’t approach leadership with some empathy.
Link: https://biz30.timedoctor.com/strategies-for-managing-virtual-teams/
Mental Snacks
This section was created to introduce ideas that may not related to starting a company, yet is important to your success as a founder.
Being Willing to Be Bad - Austin Kleon
Austin speaks on Effort Shock, the surprise that adults display when they see how much work went into being successful. In the age of social media, everything looks like it comes quick (including the money) when in actuality most startup overnight successes take over a decade.
When you learn to enjoy the process, Austin explains it as the “practice –> suck a little less –> practice –> suck a little less loop”, you find that th effort compounds and your success is as inevitable as breathing.
Link - https://austinkleon.com/2018/09/20/a-willingness-to-be-bad/
Around The Startup Ecosystem
This section was built to update you on important events, opinions, or pieces happening in the world of startups.
Dropbox acquired HelloSign for $230M - TechCrunch
When you think about this on the surface, you realize you’ve always wondered why Dropbox didn’t develop e-signature in house. Which should show you how hard it is to create a company of this size in the e-sig wars.
Not only does Dropbox get the talent, APIs, and customers (I think this is why they cut the check) in this deal, the real get is the potential.
It’s the equivalent of two superstars coming together in their prime for a run at the championship in the NBA. They’ve spent time getting really good at their core skills and thrilling fans all over, now they’re combing forces.
The potential here is in document management workflow at scale. In the future, they’ll have a way to build out document storage, matching information to correct custom fields, and then shipping out for bing signatures online.
If you had a calculation component and take aim at the real estate industry, you have an automated mortgage process. See? Potential.
Link: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/28/dropbox-snares-hellosign-for-230m-gets-workflow-and-esignature/