The Overview #23
? Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting tweets and articles from around the internet, plus highlights from my personal swipe file.
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Good competition: an example
I wanted to include this up front, as it represents a really important point.
Whatever solution your customers choose to use and pay for, they’re taking a big step! They’re making progress, working on their own missions, creating wealth, doing big things.
Good competition celebrates the customer winning. And if that means congratulating and appreciating your immediate competitors, then so be it! Competition should always be healthy; it should never resort to retaliation. Be good, do good!
Do enterprise partnerships work for startups?
On Monday, I wrote about how, in my first experience of startup life, we found success building a win-win partner ecosystem.
I’ve also worked in startups where we’ve tried to build enterprise partnerships with big consulting orgs, encouraging them to resell our product in their customer base. Spoiler: it didn’t work. We made $0 from 18 months of work on this approach.
Early-stage startups can’t outsource pipeline to partners, or build sales motions that depend on someone else. Own it all.
Should customers guide the roadmap?
What would it take for you to build a feature for just one customer? 25% of revenue? 10%? 5%? Less?
You can outsource product development to your customers and your sales team, but is that the best way forward? Your product team will feel like an agency, rather than a product function.
Ideally, you’ll move to a consistent, job-to-be-done based research approach to identify product opportunities from your customers and others in the market. You’ll weigh potential opportunities on the potential business impact, not just the number of customers who want it. And that will set better, stronger foundations for well-aligned growth and scale.
What is copywriting?
Good copywriting is not just wordsmithing. It’s communicating almost anything in a way that resonates with your customer and drives them to take action. Even more reason to develop strong evidence by discovering your buyer personas.
That’s the Overview for this week
I hope you found something of interest! Let me know by clicking the ♥ icon below.
Thanks for reading, and here’s to building momentum.
James