Food For Founders Issue #13
F3 is a paid daily newsletter where we find the best concepts on the internet that will move the needle in your business.
How to Transform and Build a People Platform
Amazon’s decentralized, “two pizza” teams work because product teams have a core set of internal tools and APIs that the teams can plug into. Spotify’s “chapters” and “squads” org structure is built around developing a mobile music player and a web app. Trying to copy them blindly ignores the context of your own company.
When you’re building a platform for your team, your people are your platform. Rather than forcing a “right way of doing things,” give people building blocks.
Companies are a lot like religions or cults: They need a set of values and beliefs that guide individual people toward the same goal.
The 6 Fundamental Skills Every Leader Should Practice
Shape a vision that is exciting and challenging for your team (or division/unit/organization). Translate that vision into a clear strategy about what actions to take, and what not to do. Recruit, develop, and reward a team of great people to carry out the strategy.
Focus on measurable results.
Foster innovation and learning to sustain your team (or organization) and grow new leaders. Lead yourself — know yourself, improve yourself, and manage the appropriate balance in your own life.
“A great brand delivers on a great promise”: 6 Brand lessons from the CEOs of Casper, SoulCycle, and Harry’s
If brand starts inside the business, nurturing it must begin as early as employee onboarding. Introducing new staffers to a company’s mission, values, and history this early gives employees the context to make more thoughtful decisions later on.
If something in the news can affect the mental health and wellbeing of the staff or consumers and leadership feels strongly about the topic, it is authentic for the brand to take an active approach in addressing those issues.
Steli Efti explains how to price a product, sell it to customers, and build a sales team.
Curiosity-provoking subject line, a question-answering body text, and a single CTA. That’s the flow of a great cold email.
The reason why it’s important to hire two or three people at a time is that if you just hire one person and they don’t perform well, you’re not going to know if it’s you teaching them poorly, if it’s them, or if it’s the market.
If you’re an early stage founder building a B2B business, my number one piece of advice is to charge more. Most founders try to price their product so cheaply that price will never be an objection. That’s not the right way to price your product.