00:21:04 · Rob Zuber
[00:21:04] S7: Having product market fit and keeping product market fit are not the same thing. So don't assume that now you've nailed it and it's always gonna be the same. Usually you hear the thing that got you here won't get you there, but the paranoia and drive to absolutely understand your customer and their need should stay. The desire to iterate quickly and always be improving and always be experimenting, don't lose that because you suddenly feel like, oh, we found it. Now we do something different. So it's a question of building on top of your drive for brilliant product, not parking that and doing something else. Now what else do you add on top of that? You're going get much higher leverage sort of go to market marketing strategy when you have a product that people love. And then depending on the scale of your customers and the type of your customers, you might also do direct sales. Direct sales can be an expensive big proposition, so you want to know that you're at a place that that's the kind of customer you have to go after. The more you can do on self serve product led growth, think the better you're going be in the early days. And then a lot of it is tweaking like, okay, people love the product, but boy, is it a lot of energy to get into the product. Maybe the onboarding flow is complex or hard to understand or whatever. How can we tighten that? Where are we losing people? So really paying attention to how people are flowing through. Because pre product market fit, you probably don't have enough numbers going through your product of users to really even understand. But now you're seeing okay lots of people are going through and they all get to this spot and something goes wrong. We lose a bunch of people here. What is that? Can we go talk to customers? Can we look at the data? How do I improve that? So really opening up the funnel to make sure people are converting and then marketing. Pour fuel on the fire, drive people in but pay attention because you'll drift from product market fit If you lose it, now you're pouring money into something that's not working.
00:22:53 · Jim Rose
[00:22:53] S5: Developers and the technologies that people ultimately select oftentimes are selected because somebody else said it was cool. A technology would kind of come and go maybe every three to six months. Now it's like five to ten days. And in the world of generative AI, it's going even faster. You know, you talk to most development teams in generative AI, you kind of plan your world on six week cycles because the technology that you started with six weeks ago may not even be relevant six weeks later. And so you want to stay as close to, at least in our case, the developer and the user and the practitioner because they're the ones who ultimately best understand the technology that they're using and can give you the greatest feedback because they will continue to use the technology that actually solves their problem, and they are very quick to throw away stuff that doesn't actually work. I would say as a company or an entrepreneur, if I were looking in the AI space is one, I would just slate clean and try and find things that I thought were inherently unique and just get very, very creative. Again, it feels very same right now. I think that people that are really going to succeed come up with ideas that today are going to feel very radical, but in two or three years are going to feel incredibly normal. But what's normal in three years is going to feel very different today. I would encourage people to be as creative as possible. I think the second part of that is I would think very deeply about what can you do that's uniquely valuable to the customer that is defensible over time. I think what you're seeing right now is as people have tried to take similar activities that we did before generative AI and have just tried to bade them, a lot of it just gets easily displaced. The big foundational models, big vendors of today basically look at kind of a unique niche application that somebody might have and they just do it better and they can do it more cheaply than some of the other providers can. And then you watch entire parts of the market disappear. I think that's pretty natural. But if you're an entrepreneur, you want to find something that you think is inherently defensible.
00:25:01 · Jim Rose
There's some reason that you as a company doing it and doing it over time accrues more and more value and accrues more and more differentiation that somebody can't come in and basically take it away from you. And that someone who comes in and takes away from you is probably going to be a Fortune 10 company that has infinitely more money and can do things at a lower cost. So you have to find something that's very unique and valuable. And one of the huge benefits of startups and being an entrepreneur is that you're unencumbered. You don't have to worry about the way it was done before. You don't have any customers and come up with something entirely new. I think that's how you find success. Find something that's truly unique, something that's truly inspirational, and spend your time there. Because most startups are going to fail. Very, very few of them succeed. The chances that you're going to succeed aren't very high. But the way you succeed is by trying to do something meaningful. If you're doing something that's truly inspirational and meaningful, maybe as a startup with the first thousands or millions of dollars that you invest, you're able to get 20% of the way there and you're able to hand the baton off and go join a larger organization who then helps you get it to the finish line. Right? But if you're just doing something that's an interesting facet or feature of somebody else's platform that's easily copyable, there's there's better ways to spend your time.
00:26:40 · S4, S6, S8, Jim Rose, S9, S3, S10
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00:27:41 · S10, S11
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