PLG & User Activation with Yaakov Carno of Valubyl
I've seen almost every time I'm working with a second or third time founder, they have that thing that I can't yet articulate perfectly of they know they need help, they don't necessarily want it, but they really want it. It's this good balance because if they don't want help, there's nothing you can do. If people don't want to change, if they don't want insight, it doesn't matter what you say, they just won't work. And that's why a lot of founders, CEOs completely ruin companies because they just completely limit themselves to outside expertise. But what I've seen second, third time founders come in recognizing how complex this is and how many blind spots they have.
Speaker 1:So they bring in people to just help them even understand what those blind spots are.
Speaker 2:Okay. We are back with another episode. I'm really excited today to bring a conversation with my good friend, Yaakov Karno, who I've known for a few years here in Jerusalem. He's an impressive young entrepreneur, adviser, and even an expert despite being relatively young. And so the goal is to share his story, discuss his business, learn some of his expertise, obviously, which I think will be really useful for a lot of people and companies and operators and hear about building a business and doing that from scratch and taking experience.
Speaker 2:And frankly, I've been super impressed with his career and life trajectory. And so looking forward to hearing about that as well. Jakob, I'll turn it over to you to give an introduction.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it, Alex. It's great to be here. Always enjoy our conversations. And, yeah, I think there's so much to dive into here, so I'm excited. I think there's a lot to share about the mistakes I've made and learned from starting a business young and just all the different kind of companies I've worked with and always learned a ton from you.
Speaker 1:So super excited to just have a good chat.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So I guess what I'd love to hear about first is, you know, your career trajectory. Like tell us, I guess, let's start with the present of what you're doing now, how it works, and then we can go back in time and how you started and how that developed and how you got to where you are now.
Speaker 1:Okay. Awesome. So right now I'm running a company called Valuable, which is a PLG agency. And what we do is we try not to use any jargon or anything, but we help subscription as a service businesses. We help them to really optimize the product in a way that just makes it really easy to understand and very easy to adopt it, learn how to use it, learn how to actually solve real problems with it.
Speaker 1:And I think this was something that's always been apparent in need. Like, when I tell people that they're like, isn't that obvious? It has to be easy to use. But when you look at the b to b world where it can be very complex and there's so many different aspects of it, just designing a very basic free trial or free plan experience goes into so much depth. So I remember when I discovered this term, this world, it was just so exciting for me to actually bring human thinking into product and to just be really empathetic with this is a real person that's signing up.
Speaker 1:Almost I use the exact same exercises today of just, like, thinking, if I'm a real person using a software, what would I do? So, anyway, without going too deep into that, that's what we do. We help b to b SaaS companies. We've worked with incredible companies from 12 different countries, got to go meet a lot of them, and got to your funny way. It wasn't the didn't go to university, didn't go to any of the the big name companies to get that kind of credit to open up.
Speaker 1:Started with nothing to my name and kind of built slowly to get where we are.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I guess one of the things that we've discussed in the past, which I think is super interesting, is this concept that I've learned to focus on inside my companies, which is simplification versus narrowing. And I think you've done an amazing job of simplifying a problem that a lot of people have and saying, I'm just gonna help solve this one problem. And so I'd love to hear about just your thought process as you discovered that because a lot of consulting expert businesses just get pulled into, oh, I'm gonna focus on this type of company and I'm gonna try to solve all their problems versus I can focus on this huge array of companies. I'm just gonna solve this one very specific consistent problem across all of them.
Speaker 2:So I'd love to hear about the process of how you discovered that and then frankly marketed that to be really clear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. It's an ongoing learning curve, and it's very similar to positioning for a company as well. And I think it goes back to, what do I know, what's my unique value proposition in this space, and it's very hard to find the balance of being super niche, but also not detrimental to your total addressable market. I think the more niche you can go in the beginning, the better, because you can do something really well. And if you can do one thing really well, you can do two things really well, and then it expands naturally and exponentially.
Speaker 1:But the way that I kind of discovered this just organically was when I first started to learn about PLG, was an SDR at a company that was transitioning into PLG, and so I lost my job as an SDR, they offered me to stay on as an analyst, and it was kind of everyone's role to learn about PLG. What is product led growth? What does that mean? It was an incredible time to actually see how a company starts to adopt the strategy, so I got to see it from within, and started to share my learnings on LinkedIn. First few posts just happened to go viral, so it was like crazy, I didn't expect any of that, And that was when it was big.
Speaker 1:It was just about product led growth. It was more strategic, more advice, more kind of theoretical. And the thing that I saw what was missing, and there was pretty much no one doing this, and still today, there's pretty much no one that actually helping solve the problem of how do we actually execute this, and taking the real activities of, well, how do we design it, how do we bite the copy, What steps do we include? What do we use? Like, there's just basic, basic things to figure out.
Speaker 1:But within that as well, it's like product led growth, as I got deeper into it, it's just a world in and of itself. And you can go into so many different tangents from acquisition to retention, expansion, churn. There's so many different things to focus on. But I saw, and why I'm niched even more in this realm of onboarding and activation, which is my kind of area of expertise, was because I saw it as such a central point in the growth funnel that affects everything else. So it was limiting who I work with and what projects I work on, but it also was an entry point to clients that turned into long term retainers, and we did end up conquering a lot of those issues, but it was a much stronger selling point.
Speaker 1:From a consideration point, like a business consideration, it was like, what can I clearly articulate as you will get results from doing this and move away from just saying, I'll advise you on your strategy, move closer into this is how we can change x, y, and z to get these results? As I started doing that, it was still kind of higher level and I was just an advisor, but I started to see real results. And then it was just an ongoing learning curve of, okay, so what are other people offering that aren't offering more accurately to say that I could offer? And one of the main things that we're now focusing on heavily is no one was actually offering to do the work. At first, I didn't even wanna go there.
Speaker 1:Was like, don't have that expertise. Like, I'm not a UX designer. I could kind of just, like, articulate what I wanted, the teams were figuring it out and getting the results. But I was like, I need to be able to solve this layer, and I don't want to take the career path of I'm going to become an expert as a designer, which is also a struggle as an entrepreneur. It's like, how deep do you go into individual skills versus staying as the founder, the CEO of actually conquering the whole picture?
Speaker 1:But I realized bringing designers in, I was able to ship entire projects which would take months in, like, a week sometimes. And so that's what we do now. Like, our main offer is Sprint where in two to four weeks, they get an entire new product experience, and they can ship it straight away, see the results, because the reality is they have to learn from it again and again. Taking a step back about, that was just a natural progression of learning, succeeding, failing, and seeing what actually is helping clients, and I think that should always be the main direction of where you're heading, is like, is this actually helping people? If it is, then you can go deeper into it, and if you're going deeper into it, you'll naturally start to expand.
Speaker 2:I think that's a fantastic North Star for anyone who's advising. Like, is this actually helping people? I think there's things that should help people. There's things that we want to help people. There's things that even might feel helpful to the people that we're trying to help.
Speaker 2:But is it actually helping and is it driving success? So I guess one of the things that we've talked about is what are those success metrics? But before I get into that, we'll put that on the side. PLG, I think it's been around like this term maybe for like really seven, probably seven years or so when it sort of like came onto the scene. And there was a handful of companies that had been doing it for a really long time.
Speaker 2:And it used to just be like called direct sales or no touch sales. And one of the things I love to do personally is take a term that's just been like swept away by the media and kind of Twitter and the lore. And it's been memed of like PLG. Remember, you know, as a VC, had like hundreds and hundreds of decks That's like, we're a PLG company. I'm like, okay, what do you think that means?
Speaker 2:And what does that actually mean? And obviously, there's no legal definition here. I just did a whole piece on ARR and like, what is ARR? Everyone talks about it. Like, does anyone actually know?
Speaker 2:So I'd love to hear like from the expert, what actually makes something PLG? What's the range of things? And like, why does that matter? Why is that inherently a good can be a good thing for companies?
Speaker 1:For sure. So I I would say it's it's a completely misunderstood term in that that when people say the product sells itself, like, what the heck does that even mean? And so I think in its in its essence, when you break it down, I would look at what does a successful company do and the individual roles, and you'll you'll start to see patterns like, okay. Sales is responsible for sourcing, qualifying, just kind of guiding, onboarding, these kind of things. Then it moves into CS, and they have to understand the use case better.
Speaker 1:They have to sell it. They have to do the storytelling. They have to help a unique use case, all these kind of things, and you really just map out what people already have to do in order to sell this product, in order to get it adopted, and now you have to stand back and think still like a human, not product or technical thinking, but saying, how can the product achieve that? The most basic things, which is like some of the first things I start with in in onboarding is, well, what questions are you asking them when they come into the product? How do you expect someone to land in your product?
Speaker 1:And you have five different use cases, and you're showing them the same thing to everyone. Like, imagine your sales rep came to you and said, oh, this company asked for this, this company asked for something completely else, but I gave them the exact same demo. It would just make no sense. And I think, like, this is comes back to a lot of my theory and just analysis of the business world is a lot of things are just common sense. Like, just think for a second about what you're trying to achieve.
Speaker 1:And and so when it comes to product led growth, I think the way that it was originally termed seven years ago by OpenView, still remember clearly because I, like, had at that stage, I was so insecure about what if someone asks me what it means, and I don't know how to say it. Like, repeated the definition again and again and again. It was definitely something along the lines of it's when the product itself is leveraged as the primary driver of acquisition, expansion, retention. But That in and of itself doesn't really help. It's like, well, what does that mean?
Speaker 1:How does it do that? That's where I think it's the most basic way to think about it. It replaces or achieves the same thing that a sales rep or a CS rep or a marketer would be able to do with that product. That I think is a very important thing, and that's why I always call it people led growth because it's just thinking like a human and seeing how to bring that interaction into the product. But yeah, across teams, it's almost similar to growth in general.
Speaker 1:Growth could be marketing for one company, product for another, finance for another, so it really varies, but I think that's the most basic way to look at it.
Speaker 2:Got it. And do you feel like in a lot of ways, whether you're an enterprise company, a consumer company, it's just become table stakes? Like products that are too hard to use, especially in like the attention deficit generation, you know, if your product's not pulling people in and engaging and pushing them to do the right things in, like, a healthy organic way, then, like, you're just gonna be out of the game sooner rather than later.
Speaker 1:Definitely. And and it will translate in in many different ways. Like, I don't think there's any company that shouldn't be doing those basic things like we we're just saying, but it depends on what's your primary model. Like, I still believe a lot of companies will will serve them better to not have a self serve motion in the typical sense, but that is still now there's so many ways that that can play out. It it doesn't have to be that your entire product is self serveable.
Speaker 1:It could be a certain component of it. Even throughout the sales process, there can be instead of just, like, this ten month POC, it could be more dynamic. It could be more experiential. But the same thing, even post sale, if it was a completely sales led operation, post sale, you want adoption to take place. People are struggling with that.
Speaker 1:They'll sign multimillion dollar deals and no one adopts the product. That that's still a a challenge there. But I think, yeah, the reality is and there's good frameworks to think about how necessary is it to add a freemium versus a free trial versus something else and seeing, like, well, are all my competitors doing it? If if they're all doing it, then there's a big problem there. And the other way is also a huge opportunity.
Speaker 1:Like, one of my clients, Israeli founder now living in in Tokyo. I loved his approach and the way that he built, and he would, like, literally turn down people from getting on a demo and wanted them to figure it out in the product, and he would force himself to do that. But what he saw in the market and why they did really well and not doing really well was because all their competitors didn't have that. They only had to book a demo flow. They only had a long sales process.
Speaker 1:So he immediately shifted to become a market leader, but now it's a crowded space. Like, everyone has a free trial. Everyone has a freemium, but the reality is most of them are still doing it really badly. So you're putting your first impression in the hands of a bad product experience. It's it's got a lot of work to be done.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like and we've all experienced this firsthand as customers, but it feels like you it could just as well be you know, things start and end with the product, but you could just as well say it's instead of product led growth, it's growth led product. And then we've kind of got these arbitrary roles where you have like the product organization, which has, you know, designers to engineers and a bunch of things in between. And then you have the kind of broader S and M like organization, which includes also, you know, has SDRs, BDRs, AEs, account managers, customer success, you know, marketing, every role in marketing. And it feels like those walls just in a lot of ways need to break down.
Speaker 2:And that's a little bit what the movement represents. And it's, I think, what customers expect to a large extent. So we'll go back to what we mentioned earlier, which is like the KPIs. Like, how do you know if it's working? Like that feels like the motion, that's the organic intelligence that I call it, that layers on top of all of this.
Speaker 2:Like what are the takeaways? Like what are some of those iteration cycles that people can go through? What are the numbers that they should be just focused on? I'm a metrics guy. So that's what I want to know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is also why I fell in love with onboarding activation is because it's so directly related to direct impact metrics, things like your free to pay conversion, your cost of acquisition, your activation rate, which is in between there. I think there's more sub variables of time to value and PQL generation, lots of depth that it can branch out into, but essentially it's measuring how many users are able to get started on their own and reach value on their own and then pay on their own. The bigger picture from a business perspective, if that can increase even a little bit, it automatically decreases your cost of acquisition. So you're bringing in a thousand users and currently only a 100 of them end up converting, or in reality, a 100 of them ever even click anything. So you could just pour more money into marketing and get more and more and more, but it's it's just this fundamentally broken funnel.
Speaker 1:And that in and of itself, I would just say, is, like, a tough balance to find because, like, how do you know if you should keep pushing on getting that optimal like, conversion rate up and up and up? Because at the end of the day, there's always gonna be a a big drop off for for those beginner users. But at the same time, it's like those those direct metrics you can look at. That that I'd say is high level, and if I would be, like, pitching an ROI calculator to one of my prospects of explaining the the direct impact, that's mainly what I would focus on. But then going deeper, it's like that's gonna affect the whole purpose of having people get to value is retention.
Speaker 1:Then they're staying around longer, and they're able to figure out more things down the line. And it's a continuous process of then going into expansion and kind of figuring out how deeper in the product use that as a growth loop in and of itself. The cost of acquisition isn't just going down because more sign ups are paying, it's that they're bringing in more sign ups. So you can start to see this whole picture. And and, that's still at a higher level and go deeper into the more granular step by step metrics we look at within activation.
Speaker 1:We'll break it up into, well, how many people achieved the different value milestones, so how many people actually I like this metric, did anything, because people actually get a shock when they see that so many people just aren't even taking the first step. Forget activation of actually using the product, but then you look at activation, and then you look at, well, how did they get from one step to the next? And the way I think about it, again, is always just, like, super basic. I'm not a deeply technical data kind of guy. I'm thinking just like a human.
Speaker 1:Okay, what happened in this journey? Almost like if you could screenshot step by step and just say, this is the drop off, this is the drop off, a basic funnel, and looking at the different pathways that just like what's actually going in there, because often you could say, well, it's actually just this piece that's broken, rather than just having, oh, free to pay conversion isn't performing. It's like, no, this is the fundamental problem, but it comes back to what question are you trying to answer. Yeah, a bit of a tangent, but those are the main metrics we focus on.
Speaker 2:Nice. So I'm obviously a finance guy, and I've gone deep into company modeling, you know, as I've advised companies over the last however many years, and built funnels in Excel. And Excel is not a great tool for funnels, for a few reasons. One, because columns in Excel that you do, like, monthly or even weekly don't tell the whole story. Excel's using it for cohorting, which is really the only thing that matters.
Speaker 2:It's not great for that. So I guess what tools are are you using to manage this, both on like the observation side, on the design side and on the measurement side?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Again, there's quite a classic tool stack when it comes to these things. I'd say for earlier stage companies with simpler models and just data types and just bigger things that they need to look into, I mean, smaller things they need to look into, just really basic product analytics tools, well, basic, but just like the classic stack of Mixpanel, Amplitude, Postarg, UserFlex. There's lots of others in the field, and everyone of is getting better and better, so it's hard to tell which one I need specifically because they're all good, but as long as you can easily track data, and this is 99% of all data, as you know, is actually having accurate data. Before anything, it's just having clean data to use, so I think making sure you're actually tracking the events effectively, and that would be the difference of for example, a tool like Posthoc will have an epic feature called AutoCapture where you just run one script and you don't have to create any custom events from an engineering point of view, but it's on a click level on a front end, so you don't get the back end data.
Speaker 1:Finding then the balance of how deep do you need to go and how deep do you want to go, that's, like, first step. And then when it gets more complex, whether it's much bigger datasets or like, teams have, the classic Looker, Snowflake, deeper, behind the scenes kind of BI tools that just are needed to handle that level of data. Tools like, for example, Pocus, a great play in the game for product led sales, fixed one of the gaps of how do we get this data into the CRM and how do we use that for our sales rep? Because there's product usage data, which then we need no like, we don't need more MQLs, SQLs, need PQLs. Who do we reach out to if we're an inbounce PLG motion?
Speaker 1:So there's so much to bridge all of those models together. And I don't think anyone solved it completely, but there's a lot of great players in there. That that's where the tech stack starts to to branch out branch out. But I'd say the fundamentals is having a great event tracker and CDP to send that data to the right places.
Speaker 2:Nice. I guess the question that everyone's probably wondering right now, it's kind of the topic du jour, is like how does AI change this both on the product side for products that are interacted with differently now? And then on the back end side, like how what kind of again, it's a little bit of an extension of the tool question. Like, what can people do to improve it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's great timing. I'm writing my third piece with Kyle Poya, who is part of OpenView, which are the people that coined the term PLG. We we our first piece was continuing on this conversation, a deep dive into our case study with Databox, how we actually used onboarding to fix the PLG motion or scale the activation. And then our second one was earlier in the UX patterns of AI.
Speaker 1:So we already started diving into what teams are doing, but then now we're going deep into, okay, like, what's actually how do you build with AI? What do you need to produce? And going back to first principles of what is value, what is activation, and what are the AI tools that teams are using to speed that up or just completely change the game. I think fundamentally, taking a step back in how people are approaching AI and product, I think people have completely lost their mind. And one specific point, which I was speaking about yesterday, I think it's it's so true, is that people forget, and rarely smart thinkers in product like Marty Marty Kagan, I think that's his name, really explaining what the goal of product is in solving problems and essentially you creating a solution, not just building what anyone wants to do.
Speaker 1:That's that's one type of product to allow endless customization, endless possibility, but there's many times that people want you to purposely limit what they do because you solve the problem better. And now people are kind of, like, running on this hype trend, adding in prompt boxes that just create crazy amounts of variation, which they don't know how to handle yet, and they just aren't adding value. It's like people have forgotten the basics of, are you solving a problem? Are you actually helping them understand how to solve it? And so there's basic UI UX patterns on the front end level, I would call it, and on the back end, it's like, well, how are we redirecting those conversations?
Speaker 1:How are we leveraging our own internal interactions with LLMs and feeding it the right data and learning from it? I had an interesting conversation with a VP of self serve at Grafana recently, and he was explaining because they're open source with tons of very, very good information, it's supercharging their efforts to build out really strong models for this, But even there, it's like it's so hard to measure and track where people are going through different parts in all of this. When it comes to activation, I think it still has to come back to the basics. It's got nothing to do with them just using the product prompting and having hype. Like, it's I would separate what most people call the moment.
Speaker 1:That's activation. They're actually receiving value, but this is just a wow factor, which has its place. Like, if you look at these tools, the wow factor is real that they have a crazy cool experience, but stickiness is also a huge challenge today. Like, how many people are actually building sustainable models on Lovable, Replit, like, all these kind of tools? And so it's it's coming back to, okay.
Speaker 1:Great. They had the wow factor, which is great for virality and acquisition, But in terms of retention and a business model, are people actually getting value? Are we actually solving the problem? And not losing part of our vision of what we solve for just because it can do it with AI.
Speaker 2:For sure. Kind of in the near that, I'm going to like ask, what are the three biggest mistakes that you see early and mid stage founders, product leaders making? And, you know, go to market teams, whoever, anyone in this entire realm, what are the three, like the top three public enemies?
Speaker 1:Wow. Okay. There's it be in so many different areas, but I'd say start with the top two, and I I branch out into too much and too little. So this is where again, because you're kind of shooting in the dark, you're not there walking through the product with them, the product has to do that qualification itself, you teams have this almost fear of losing out, and and it's it's it's rational in some sense because they worked very hard and acquisition will spend a lot of money to bring those users in, but they think throwing everything at them hoping one thing will stick, that's that's a good solution, but it just overwhelms users, and people are coming in with a very specific intent most of the time. If they're just exploring around, still, like, you gotta design for exploration, not just overwhelm.
Speaker 1:I'd say that's number one part, which branches out into a lot of internal company dynamics as well, not only in the product. But then the second side is too little, is that you haven't actually designed a self serve model. It's just a free trial. They can have access, but there's nothing that actually helps them get started. You just drop them in the product and expect them to figure out or give them a doc or two, but it's like the whole product needs to change to achieve those things that a sales or CS rep would do.
Speaker 1:It's hard enough to do as a human. How do you expect your product to do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I feel like there's just such a gap often between what makes sense like logically. You can draw flowcharts of and every part of it, right? It's like I always say, A, B, C, D, E makes sense. But abcadah is not a word, right?
Speaker 2:Like, and I think that it's easy to forget, right? Like in all areas of life, we want to be guided. We like, in a lot of ways, want to be sold to. Like people want a certain amount of a feeling of autonomy and decision making, but just dumping everything on people and expecting them to do the work is not going to happen. And then on the other side, it's like, I remember the leader in kind of user product discovery, like going back ten years ago was Snapchat.
Speaker 2:And that was the gold standard in user discovery inside the app. They never told people what the new features were. You would just tap around and swipe around. When they released filters, they didn't say anything. You just had to like accidentally one time, like swipe to the left, and then there was a filter.
Speaker 2:And you're like, oh, wow, there it is. And it was such this like organic, very natural expression. And it's like, look, if you're not Snapchat, you're not Snapchat. But there is a deeper level of experience that I think a lot of it comes down to just looking in the mirror. Like, what are you gonna respond to?
Speaker 2:I've made this mistake myself, right? Like, I'll be doing an SPV with my LPs for one of our companies. And I'll, like, put together the whole memo, like, the materials. I'll even, like, record a video because I'm like, that's engaging. And then I just dump it all on, like, one Notion page into like a link in an email.
Speaker 2:And it's like, No, that's never gonna work, right? Like, you need to like put out the breadcrumbs for people and like, Hey, I've got this really cool opportunity to do a follow on. Are you interested? Okay. Now let people opt into that.
Speaker 2:So, like, I think in every business, you've got and then and then again, you you you string them down, and that's what people want. They wanna build the excitement and the engagement naturally in an organic way versus just like this deluge of features and, you know, data and information. So, yeah, I feel that in a big Definitely. Way
Speaker 1:And just I'd say that's the third piece, like the too much, too little, and then the fundamental problem at play is that builders, whether it's product or in your situation, building out all of these resources and decks and presentations or whatever we're doing in life, is we completely forget that the person we're presenting to or serving has no idea what was going through our brain. And so the person building this product has been building this for three years, knows every little detail, and I can already see the whole user journey unfolding in three seconds, and then you throw a person in and expect them to, like, know even where to click. And it's funny. I, like, often, it feels hard to ask stupid questions, but I'd say things like, what's a variable, what's a file, what's a table, because the language, even though people know what those things are, when they're in a new product, they have no idea what it means in that product, and often it means something very different. It's like really taking a step back of a beginner's mindset and being able to I'd say the only way you can really do that is having someone external.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have to be an expert even, could be a beginner user, but really objectively separating yourself from the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's something I go into a lot where I would say like the best products ever were not designed by focus group. They were designed by visionaries and they solved a problem for people in a way that the people never would have thought of. And the example I use is like in the '90s, like Ford came out with this minivan, I remember, and it had like 25 cup holders. And they used to do design by focus groups.
Speaker 2:They'd dig a bunch of random people that they thought represented their customer base and be like, What do you guys want? And like, these are just random people. They're like, maybe more cup holders because like that's the only thing they could think of. These aren't designers. These aren't like creative people.
Speaker 2:They're just like moms who drop their kids off at soccer practice, you know, like, and that's all they The could think
Speaker 1:famous quote with Henry Ford about, If I would have asked them what I should build, they would have told me fussed off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. And the other example I give in like the car world is, you know, the blinker that has two levels, right? And so the first one is like for a lane change, and then it will blink like three or five times and stop. Like, I remember when BMW came out with that feature twenty years ago. Like, no one asked for that.
Speaker 2:And now it's a standard, and without it, it's just like annoying. You're like, How old is this car that I'm driving that doesn't have that? You know? And that's really what you want to be. You want to be like locked in with people getting used to it.
Speaker 2:I'll also just call out, you know, we're using Riverside right now to record this, which is a wonderful product with tons of features. And I've been signed up for it for a long time. I hadn't used it in a while until like a couple weeks ago. And first of all, everything is like black. And it's got like this modern design where there's no like boxes around buttons.
Speaker 2:So you can't tell the difference between sometimes like a word and a button. And I'm just like, If you know where everything is, that's great. But if you don't, I'm like, Wait, can I click that? Can I not click that? Like, don't know what happens.
Speaker 2:Like, they almost made it like a little too elegant. And then maybe it'll pop up like the guides where, you know, they're like, Oh, you know, it'll be a thing over it. Like, do this. Like, no one wants to read those. Everyone just skips through them every time.
Speaker 2:And then you're like, lost. Like, wait, I don't know where to find this and do this. So that whole, like, remember, like people are beginners and like give that option, I think is great. It's like even on the United Airlines website, there's this thing called expert mode, and you have to like go into settings and turn it on. And so it's almost like let people turn it on instead of like jamming features down their throat.
Speaker 2:It's just something I've experienced. Riverside's a wonderful product, extremely well designed, extremely functional. They've done an amazing job of, like, developing features that save you a ton of time and everything. But it's it's you've always you know, it's so easy to get locked in. So going back to what I was saying about focus groups, there's a difference between like getting feedback from people and just taking it and like, Oh my gosh, I just spent six months figuring out how to do this.
Speaker 2:And they're just like, Yeah, I just found that whole experience annoying. And you're like, Oh my gosh. But that's a reality that you've got to sit with. And again, we're all consumers. And remember that there's another piece here that twenty years ago, people talked about the consumerization of the enterprise, where instead of enterprise tools all looking like MS DOS, they started looking like, and it led up to again, Snapchat, right?
Speaker 2:It should look and feel modern. And I think that there's more to it than that, right? It's understanding that the decision process and the actual user matters. And the gold standard is much higher than it ever was. And there's so many different layers to what that means, like the consumerization of the enterprise.
Speaker 2:And obviously, the consumerization of the consumer matters as well. But we're all consumers. We can all relate. It's so easy to get stuck down the rabbit hole. So I guess, you know, we'll come to we'll wrap up soon here.
Speaker 2:But one other thing I want to cover is just kind of an open ended. Is there anything else you think people should know? Any other pieces of advice in this area? Also, thing I want to touch on is like when to hire you or someone like you, when to hire someone full time. So I'll leave it to you to kind of answer that open ended question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great, and I'll work backwards there. Just did an interview with one of my clients a couple of weeks ago, and I asked them the question of, why would you choose to work with us? And, like, when do you know is the right time as well? And so in this specific area, it would be a way longer answer of where they are in their positioning, what stage, because you kind of work on onboarding activation at every stage, so it'll be a different type of project, but you need to be evolving with your positioning, with your marketing, with all these kind of things. So it's there's always opportunity, but sometimes obviously not the right thing in terms of priority and resources.
Speaker 1:But the the question I'd asked him is, if you you have incredible product people and product designers, like, why why did you go with me? And he gave a really good answer. He said, well, even a really good product designer has probably even if they have ten years experience and worked at three different companies, maybe touched on the problem of onboarding and activation as or PLG self serve once, twice, maybe three times, or or none throughout their career. And so he'd much rather bring someone in who's done this repeatedly across different companies, seen different patterns, actually run hundreds of experiments to see what doesn't work, what works, and gives his team that muscle before building out the whole team internally. Because, ultimately, same with my agency.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to build Inel's team because there's there's benefits to that. But there's also a benefit to have on having someone that's not attached to the product in that sense and can bring that wealth of experience for something very specific. And I I phrase the question, Tim, more of the lines of I, myself, like everyone else, is has this weird fear of like, well, how is AI gonna change my role, my market, my space? Is it gonna replace me? Is it gonna do this?
Speaker 1:Like, everything that people are asking. And what I've seen is that actually there's more of a desire for these niche agencies, not generalist agencies. It's people that can solve one specific or two, three specific really good problems and actually help with that depth, because right now, to get the depth that you need from AI, you can get almost like a generalist in so many areas, but these specific areas stand out now of can you solve this specific problem really well. So, yeah, I'd I'd leave off with that.
Speaker 2:Well, so I would I would that's that was my next question too of, like, know, how do you if someone wants to build a consulting business, like what advice do you have? Mean, you kind of Don't do it. You answered kind that in a lot of ways, which is get specific. But there's this other idea that I've run into over and over again. And it was part of the inception of my own business and its development over the last, I guess, six, seven years, ten years almost, which is what I call the paradox of advice, which is if someone knows that they have an issue or challenge in a certain area, and then they go ask for advice and try to source an expert or whatever, or reach out to one of their advisors, that's great.
Speaker 2:And then they tell them, here's what you should do and here's who you should talk to and whatever. That's great. But I view that as inherently incremental. What I've found is game changing is, like, when someone doesn't know they need advice and they get it, sometimes they don't want it, but they get it, that is how you change someone's life or a company's life. And the the the kind of analogy that I use, like, if you came to a street corner and there was an old lady with her groceries who asks you to help her cross the street and you help her, that's really nice.
Speaker 2:But if you're at the same street corner and that same old lady is walking into the street and she doesn't see that there's a car coming and you do and you pull her back on the sidewalk, you just saved her life. She didn't ask you for help. And so I guess one of the questions that, you know, you run into is that oftentimes, you know, it's the same thing with hiring and firing. Like, most people are too late with these things. Like, by the time they realized that they needed help, it's already too late.
Speaker 2:So I guess what message would you send of like, you know, you're already too late? Like, you know, how can people kind of avoid the dead end issues and get ahead of problems? Again, which is arguably the product building journey of just like this death by a thousand cuts and prioritization. But how would you approach that?
Speaker 1:It's like solving the problem of humanity itself. Floyd would
Speaker 2:be proud. Let's go.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is I've seen almost every time I'm working with a second or third time founder, they have that thing that I can't yet articulate perfectly of they know they need help. They don't necessarily want it, but they really want it. Like, it's this good balance because if they don't want help, there's nothing you can do. Like, if people don't want to change, if they don't want insight, it doesn't matter what you say, they just won't work. And that's why a lot of founders, CEOs completely ruin companies because they just completely limit themselves to outside expertise.
Speaker 1:But what I've seen second, third time founders come in recognizing how complex this is and how many blind spots they have, so they bring in people to just help them even understand what those blind spots are. And one of my clients recently said, again, in one of those interviews was, I wasn't even sure what exact value I was gonna get out of this project. I just knew it would be a lot of it. And so I think that's exactly what you're saying. And I think from advice on a consulting business, don't start with those people that don't know they have a problem.
Speaker 1:Start with people that know they have a problem. And that's the same with with product. Like, are you going into a market that's problem aware, solution aware, or problem unaware, solution unaware, and you have to, like, educate them first, expand on them first. And if you are going that route, then it takes a long time, and I've seen my content do that in really good ways, is that it teaches them how to think what to look for, and then they come to you, oh, I checked this out and we actually have a big problem here. So it's like you have to educate your market no matter where you are in the space, but definitely start with something that you're actually solving a pain point.
Speaker 1:Like, it's the classic vitamin verse painkiller. Like, what you doing there? Are you just kind of you could add value or you're solving something that's about to hit them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's I mean, the vitamin painkiller thing strikes me super hard. Like, my philosophy has been kind of trying to be preventative medicine for a number of years now and help people avoid issues. There's only so much you can do, though. And the example I give is that a personal trainer will pretty much never make as much money as a heart surgeon, or a dietitian will never make as much money as a heart surgeon, except in one manifestation of that, which is that like if you're Tom Brady's personal trainer. And that's what I'm trying
Speaker 1:to do.
Speaker 2:That's why I run a fund. Ultimately, my love is working with founders and helping them avoid missteps and really maximize their potential. But it's an ever growing challenge. And I think that you've figured it out an amazing way. Like if you're not already following Jakob on LinkedIn, you definitely should.
Speaker 2:Like the content's great. It gets people to think it's not too deep. I've definitely been guilty of content that's too deep, that people just they're like, oh, no. That's too much. I can't engage with that right now.
Speaker 2:Like, I can't I I'm thinking too much. Like, you know, making things simple, relatable, actionable for people, to just get them to think a little bit, and then you're the guy that they they think of. And I think you've you've done an amazing job of that over the last few years building the business.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it. It means a lot coming from you. Really mean that. Let me just fix my camera here. I think my phone died.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, it it really means a lot coming from you, someone who I admire as a a visionary business owner. And I think, I'm just figuring it out like everyone else and trying to just do my best. We're all just trying to figure it out and help people.
Speaker 2:Alright. Thanks so much, man. We'll, we'll look forward to, some of your content. We'll share it, and, we'll talk to you soon. Alright.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, Alex.
