Akash Chaudhari

Startup Learnings

Well Startups is a very complex thing becuase it has power to solve but in long run becomes a entity driven by time and opportunity. There are many many things that defines a business and how customers percieve it.

The Pillars include

Engineering, Marketing, Environment, Customer Success, Sales, Management, Image, Trust, Differentiation Factor, Price, Funded or Bootstraped and many depends on what kind of horse you are on..

Most important things are mainly killing the passion bug, finding questions before you answer them and knowing the process.

Mostly in view prespective there are milestones

Whenever you hit a milestone your business motion and value changes.... if you solve first 4 steps your thinking and direction will change to much ....

The Sub Phases

Product Market Fit

  1. Test Hypothesis ("What are you solving & How")
  2. Prove Value ("our solution is acceptable")
  3. Prove that it can be sold ("Founder makes a sale")

Well in this step we generally keep the cash burn low and majorly founders work on this ...

Search for Repeatable Scalable Profitable Model

  1. Find Repeatable Sales Motion ("A Pattern that can be sold to many !!")
  2. Prove Non Founders can sell ("Our first Mini Sales Team")
  3. Make it scalable ("Does it Actually Scale")
  4. Ensure Customer Success ("Can we scale without success, if customer success will be great word of mouth, sales & marketing will follow itself")
  5. Make it profitable ("Can we scale profitably")

Now here we find pattern in our offering and try to sell it to mega audience... at this step founders make a playbook for sales team that they follow to sell... founders work is very much important here ... along with that what major startups skip is customer success.. here it is necessary that we figure out two things first is what makes customer happy and other is what makes us profitable ....

Scaling the business

  1. Hit the gas & Scale ("Now we have figured out the scalable model it's time to churn money")
  2. Scale Organization & it processes
  3. Expand International
  4. Add additional product to line

Mistakes

The Major are this ones

  1. Startups jump the step like "without proving value we start selling to mega" or "without figuring out sales motion we hit the gas"
  2. We hit the gas before achieving step 8 and we don't hit the gas after we achieve step 8
  3. We don't sell to the mark
  4. We are not good with people
  5. We are not always closing
  6. We are not good with math
  7. We don't have enough persuasion
  8. Our sales people are not self independent
  9. We are not doing competitor analysis
  10. We don't know KPI's
  11. We are not adding enough value

Steps For Each Milestone

Step 1: Deck to validate problem ("what problem you are solving")

  1. do you think do you have this problem
  2. do you have this problem
  3. how you are solving this problem
  4. do you really care about this problem

Here you will get some feedbacks on which Major decision and results are

  1. base it or home run
  2. are people ready for beta test your solution ("this is important")
  3. who else to talk to
  4. what you are solving ("sometimes you find what problem you are solving and what people have is different")
  5. for who you are solving ("a blurry persona of people")
  6. How you will measure success ("Important")

Step 2: MVP ("your solution")

This is your Home Ground you have to choose how your mvp looks like your focus should be feedback not features... don't make a lot.. observe a lot...

Step 3: Selling ("Will People pay for it")

Here our focus is not to make money but to get weather people will pay for it .... so don't do it for free... people in this world will take your shit for free....

Step 4: Selling to Many

Now at this point we need some sales people to do narrowing and add things to your calender... Goal is

  1. Find General Objections
  2. Make a Playbook for Sales People

Step 5: Make a Money machine ("repeatable sales motion")

Here we will

What we want to get things done is

What we want to achieve ?

  1. A Single Target Market
  2. Who in Organization to sell to
  3. What Pain/Use case to Target
  4. What Messaging (One)
  5. What Sales Motion
  6. What Pricing
  7. What new Products/features are needed

This will result in

  1. Marketing Playbook
  2. Sales Playbook
  3. Customer Success Playbook
  4. Renew and upsell playbook

Steps to Achieve Above is

  1. Fire up initial Lead Source

  2. Go to Single target market

    • List the targets
    • Score them
    • Chose Best

A General Table of Targeting (Choose urgency over rich)

Target TAM Urgency Work required other factors....

  1. Who to target - Above will provide who to target

  2. messaging - create messaging for above target

    • For Who ?
    • who needs what ?
    • Our Category ?
    • Provide Key Benefits ?
    • Unlike key competitors ?
    • we provide key differentiator ?

5. Design Buyer's Journey

  1. Pick a Single Target Market

  2. Pick a Single Use Case

  3. message:- Single Target and Single Use Case

  4. Process

    • Allow Trials
    • Define Where buyer in buying process and sell to urgency
    • remove funnel blockage points

  5. Follow Customer Buying Process

  6. Design Buyers Centric

  7. Dialog ("important")

    • Design for awareness
    • Design for consideration ("this is important")
    • Design for purchase

  8. Triggers

    • Look for triggers to buy

  9. Create buyers persona

    • Character
    • Role
    • Their Goal
    • Their Motivation
    • What will make their job easier

  10. Look for Pain Points

    • What pain point do they have
    • how they describe their pain
    • is solving pain high priority
    • what is trigger that cause them to buy
    • are they searching solution
    • most important feature/criteria
    • relation
      • like
      • unlike
      • main concern

  11. Competitor analysis

6. Stages that are important

Stranger -> Visitors -> Leads -> Customers -> Promoters

Stranger Visitors Leads Customers Promoters...
We need to do awareness campaigns This will make them a visitor to business The visitor is a Lead A Proper Persuasion, Value Offering & Interest will make them customer A Proper Customer Success will make them Promoter
Top of Funnel Middle of Funnel Sales Customer Success

Awareness -> Interest -> Purchase -> Post Purchase

Awareness Interest Purchase Post Purchase
Sales, Marketing Value Offering and Pain Solution Proper Delivery Customer Success

Top Tips

Funnel

Sales Flow

Map Buyer's Process

Research -> Shortlist -> Check Review Sites -> Evaluation

Web -> Competitor Analysis -> Feedback -> Rol Calculator

Goto market Model

  1. Make Sales Process Easy

  2. Find sales complexity

    • High price
    • How hard it is to get started
    • risk to business
    • required purchase of other products

  3. PQL - Product Qualified Lead

    • Free
    • Increase requirement and sales

  4. Sales

    • Try to Close PQL before sales

Step 6: Measure Conversion

For Digital Conversion

Total performance = total lead * conversion rate * average deal size

so if total lead = 200 and our ur conversion rate is 2% and over average deal size is ₹100 our performance is

total performance = 200 * 0.02 * 100 = 400

For Sales Rep

total performance = total opportunity * sales productivity

Productivity per rep

Summary

Step 7: Ensure Customer Success

mistake

Step 8: Make it profitable

You have converted the ods hit the gas now ....

Unit Economics

  1. Net New ARR = New ARR + Existing ARR - Churned ARR

ARR = Annual Recurring Revenue

  1. Check ROI on lead source
  2. Reverse calculate to create reports

Factors of Success

  1. Successfully onboarding of customer
  2. Successfully onboard supplier and measure them

Measure Dollar and Customer Churn

Steps

  1. Acquire -> Retain -> Monetize
  2. Focus on Value
  3. Are you delivering value

Define Following

  1. CAC
  2. LTV
  3. ARPA (Monthly recurring value)

Factors of success

LTV > 3 * CAC

Months to recover CAC < 12 Months

LTV = ARPA * GROSS MARGIN / $CHURN