Fuzzy Sequence (Iterative S23)

Co-Founder and CTO

ey skin & wellness

Co-Owner, Advisor

Base58

Co-Founder and CPO

UiPath

AI for work (Automation Cloud). Worked on: Google Suite Automation - Google Slides, Google Docs.

Senior Technical Product Manager

Grab

Blitzscaled and raised $30M in Series A (valued at $150M), secured the first e-scooter permit in APAC amidst COVID-19

Co-Founder, Country Head of GrabWheels

Launched micro-mobility in the 4th largest market in the world

Launcher, Grab Ventures

Internal Product Team. Introduced RPA to Grab to enable blitzscaling. Driver-partner retention for SG. Founding team for on-demand delivery, GrabExpress.

Product Manager, Automation

Halliburton

Introduced RPA to Supply Chain business center via SAP

Regional Supply Chain Manager

Leadership with a cross-functional team of 30 across South East Asia + Japan

Area Demand Planning Manager

Leadership with a cross-functional team of 15 across Thailand

Country Materials Manager 

Supply Chain Management Program (SCMP)

Co-Founder at Nuflow | Mass payouts for marketplaces

Pete Vejanurug 🦾

Harvard Innovation Labs

Fellow

Waffle

Building on AWS is finally easy with Waffle, your AWS DevOps copilot. 1-click infra + easy management. More: Wafflesoc2.com

Co-Founder

Reframe

I help founders navigate the early, messy, founder-led sales stage, 0->$1M ARR. Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly exploration of the mechanics of product-market fit. When you're ready, join my PMF Camp, where I'll review your customer calls, demo, messaging, and give you a ton of examples from other startups.

Learn more: robsnyder.org

Newsletter: howtogrow.substack.com

Founder

Redstick Ventures

Reach out if you're in restaurant + food tech!

Venture Partner

MuukTest

QA Automation software that *finally* gives CTOs peace of mind

Advisor

Food Foundry

Food Foundry is a Chicago-based growth accelerator program by Relish Works, built in partnership with Gordon Food Service.

Entrepreneur in Residence

Incendium Strategies

Founder in Residence

HourWork

Anthros Consulting

Consultant

Evrnu, SPC

Intern

Building things with soul. ex-McKinsey, Harvard Business School, and B2B founder ($0-$4M ARR in 2 years).

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I help founders navigate the early, messy, founder-led sales stage, 0->$1M ARR. Follow my newsletter for thinking on product-market fit you won't find elsewhere: howtogrow.substack.com

When you're ready, join my PMF Camp, where I'll personally review your sales calls, decks, outreach, and give you a ton of examples and templates. Learn more at robsnyder.org

Rob Snyder

Met a founder in Finland last week who has recently bootstrapped to $5M+ ARR because she "didn't know how to raise money, and just selling to customers felt more intuitive."

My sense is that basically everything in startups today optimizes in the opposite direction. I see so many pitches that work on stage, or sound good in an investor meeting, or so many things that sound hyped on social media... basically, everything BUT what matters most, which is "it works with customers"

Working with customers is straightforward:
- If you can stack a bunch of investor meetings together, you can stack a bunch of potential customer meetings together
- Ask what potential customers are trying to achieve, but blocked
- Offer them something that un-blocks them (usually as a service first - this founder sold a service without knowing how to deliver it... and figured it out as she delivered it)
- Try to repeat, automate, and shape into a fast-growing business

It just seems impossible when we're solving for the product we think VCs want us to build. It is simple, very difficult, but simple.

Fellow @ Harvard Innovation Labs | Founder @ Reframe + Restack | Harvard Business School, ex-McKinsey

A friend's startup crawled out of the grave this year. They were on track to run out of money last month, with no customers and a product nobody wanted. 

They turned it around, and I wish more people knew their story - it is extremely common among startups that eventually find product-market fit.

For two years, they had:
- Done a ton of customer research
- Built a product and had a few design partners using it for free
- Negotiated pilot agreements that were in theory moving forward, but so slowly they were starting to wonder if it was enthusiasm vs. demand

At one point, they looked at the clock and realized they had 6 months of cash left and zero chance of raising another round or even getting profitable.

And so their world collapsed, and they realized they just needed to find one customer. They would do whatever this customer wanted, and try to figure out something repeatable based on what this customer wanted.

The founder had a chance encounter with an exec at a healthcare company (the founder had no healthcare background, previous product was not focused in that direction). The founder essentially asked: "What's your top priority that you're blocked on? What would you pay me to help you solve / get off your plate?"

The exec shared that they were trying to intel about what doctors and patients were saying online about relevant topics to their business. They were paying a consulting firm to give them reports and these reports were expensive and bad. If the founder could figure out a way to do this, the exec would pay. A couple of weeks later, this exec turned into customer number 1.

After this conversation, the founder took the exec's demand - "I want a better way to get intel about what patients/doctors are saying online about X" - and found a way to talk with other, similar execs, and essentially said, "hey, I heard this from another exec - is this at all relevant to you?" Through these conversations, they got another couple of customers who wanted somewhat similar things.

When they sold to these customers, their product did not exist. The founders delivered reporting manually. They did not apologize for delivering reporting manually, nor did they pretend they had a product. The customer just wanted better intel; the founders promised they'd deliver better intel. In delivering manually, they figured out what the product needed to be. And they are now starting to consistently onboard customers and figure out repeatability.

Zooming out, this is the way startups generally go from "not working" to "working." We clear out all the clutter of our ideas and how we want the world to work, and instead obsessively focus on what customers need help accomplishing. When we do this, customers pull a not-yet-ready product out of us. When we don't, we push our fancy product at customers, see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, until the moment we look at our runway and revenue and realize we've been LARPing all along.

I've found that if you read your outbound messages and say, "What does this message imply that I believe about other human beings?" the exercise is (1) horrifying and (2) leads to much better-performing messaging

Almost all messaging is:
-> All about me and what I want
-> Or, what I want you to want, as if you're a sheep to be herded
-> Or using cute psychology hacks that basically view other people as manipulable means to your ends

If you just ask - What's in this person's best interest? What would actually serve them? - you'll see better results and feel less gross with outbound. 

The bar is very, very low.

In Helsinki (!) just recorded a deep-dive into demand, product-market fit, and 0-1 sales… here’s a teaser… full hour+ video coming soon!

Shout out to Richard Makara for coming up with the idea, Maria 01 for hosting us, Nicolas Dolenc and Sebastian Westerling for producing

The super hard part of 0-1 is realizing the difference between someone who *needs* your product, versus the infinite people who *would benefit from it*

I watch a TON of founders' sales calls, and I rarely see total train wrecks. The most common pattern I see is:
- Sales calls seem to go well
- Then... they ghost you, or sales takes forever, and you get a ton of feature requests and aren't sure why
- As a result, sales cycles are super slow, low-converting, and you're not exactly sure why or what to do about it

Why this happens:
- You could provide clear value + objective ROI
- They have relevant pain points and problems they rant about
- Your pitch something that makes sense to them & would solve the above
... but they don't *need* it.

A *need* is defined by:
-> A person actively trying to accomplish X...
-> ...but they are blocked by their current options

If this is not the case, they would be weird to buy your product now. They would have to drop their existing priorities to buy your product. Which would be a weird thing to do.

If you look into your recorded sales calls, and compare the ones that bought fast vs. ones that didn't buy, what you'll typically uncover is:
- The ones that bought fast articulated a *need*
- The ones that didn't buy fast did EVERYTHING OTHER than articulate a need (complained about pain points, liked your product, agreed about the ROI)

There is a subtle difference between a *need* and everything else, and when you see it, you:
- Define your ICP based on who has a need right now
- Change your messaging to resonate with those who have a need right now
- Rethink your GTM mix

This winds up narrowing your focus, which is scary - there are so many other people who WOULD BENEFIT from our product! - but designing around a real *need* is ~90% of what matters for growing super-fast (and you figure out how to expand your market over time)

Early on, you can often just sell a service as your "MVP" - rather than spending a bunch of time building a product that people may or may not want.

I've done this in two startups in the last couple of weeks, selling into very different markets: small construction firms + enterprise pharma.

Some notes on selling services:
-> It is a very good way to test that demand actually exists, which is by far the biggest risk startups face.
-> You can get traction *today*. Rather than months or years from now.
-> It's also a very good way to figure out what product is actually worth building, and you find the product you would have built was 1,000% wrong.
-> Buyers often buy services much faster, at higher prices, with lower expectations, than software products.
-> The sales pitch for this kind of "productized" service is virtually identical to what will eventually be the pitch for the product. (We think the sales pitches have to be wildly different because we wrongly assume the sales pitch for a software/AI product is a long demo... it's not)
-> Yes, there is a risk that you "just" become a profitable agency, yes, it is hard to transition from service to product, no, it doesn't scale, no, not every market will support this. Still, it's worth exploring, because the default state down other paths is wasting years building something nobody wants, and the main reason people object to this is because they just want to avoid selling a little longer.

Anyone got good examples of selling services first??

VC vents to me: "Founders pitch me as if I can validate their ideas. I can't - only customers can!"

The more time I spend with VCs, the less they look like the VCs that exist in founders' minds.

In my experience:

Most wish we spent more time with customers, less time on everything else

Most recognize that product is important, yet that it is downstream of demand

Most recognize that it's really hard to find demand, and that this is all-encompassing in the early days

Most genuinely want to be helpful, though none want to figure it out for you or manage you

Most don't like VC theater, think a huge part of the venture industry is nonsense/backwards, and wish you listened more to customers than investors

And, unfortunately, most struggle to articulate this, so we stay stuck with bad ideas

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Pete Vejanurug 🦾

Rob Snyder

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