Hi, I'm Tim

One of the most prolific creators I've come across recently is Anythony Pompliano. He's the host of the Pomp Podcast and writes a daily newsletter, called the Pomp Letter to 85,000 investors. He has become the voice of Bitcoin in the investing community. Yet three years ago, from what I can find, he was another guy working at Facebook. He started his Twitter account in 2017, his Pomp letter in May 2018 and the podcast in August 2018.

What's most impressive about him is his output. Like other prolific creators, like Seth Godin, who has written on his blog daily for years, or Casey Neistat who has published hundreds of videos on YouTube, he has shown to use the importance of showing up.

Regardless of whether you believe in Bitcoin or believe in Pomp's analysis, you have to give him props where it's due: he consistently delivers and he continues to get the top thinkers in tech, investing, and bitcoin on his podcast. He has grown his audiences across multiple platforms and as a result has created a mini empire.

There's a few lessons here. The first is the power of showing up and of effort. I still believe that intellect, wealth, and natural ability are given to much emphasis over the impact on one's ability to achieve great things. Perhaps that's because if it was all due to hard work and effort, it'd be less hard to hide behind.

The second lesson is the undeniable leverage and impact the internet can can create for those who want to take it. Now, anyone can own their niche or create their audience, either start and grow businesses or just make an impact on their careers. The fall of the traditional gatekeepers brings chaos in the void left behind, but it also beings massive opportunity for anyone who wants to take it.

It's become easier than ever to build new products. Due to standard web frameworks and the standardization of product development and growth methodologies, like lean startup and growth hacking, there's more resources and knowledge available to create and scale a SaaS product.

The no code movement takes this a step further. In an effort maximize the "M" in MVP (minimum viable product), creators are skipping the building altogether. Now there's more options than ever to build the earliest and smallest versions of product using no code tools.

• Need a landing page? Use Carrd's UI builder
• Need a newsletter? Use Convertkit, Mailchimp, and now Substack
• Need a database? Start with Airtable, Google Sheets and update it via Zapier
• Need a website? Build it on Webflow in a few hours

‍Trello Versus Today

Previously I wrote about the incredible rise of Trello. One of the reasons for it's incredible success was the advanced technology stack it was using at the time. Instead of the traditional static web apps (updates require a page refresh), it used of Web Sockets, JavaScript frameworks, and templating languages that gave it a real-time, responsive, and fast user experience. With Trello, you can drag and drop, update cards, and view updates in real-time, all without any lags and page refreshes.

But today, with the maturity of JavaScript frameworks like React, document databases like MongoDB, these are table stakes... It's far easier today to create a responsive web app like Trello.

The Future Is Media

In the future the winners are those who not only can ship the fastest, but those who can build their audiences and rally around a community or build one. The future SaaS company looks more like a media company: create the content first, build your audience, and then build the product that serves them best. SaaS product development is beginning to look more like traditional blogs. You write, write, write, then you sell the book, the course, or the merchandise.

Creating your audience and even better, your community, is appearing to be a more productive go-to-market and retention strategy. Since it's far easier to build products, it's even easier to build for no one. As a result, creators ship tons of MVPs that nobody wants. What they find is that they lack the feedback and the audience to ship into, thus gaining any traction.

So think about flipping the cycle: can you build the audience, find your community first? Then and only then can you be in a better position to launch your products, services, and courses.

When starting new projects it is almost inevitable that your scope is too large, too complex, and takes us away from rather than closer to our ultimate objective.

We begin to plan and build and orchestrate all the things we want to complete to make the thing happen.

• Want to create a newsletter? Skip the fancy email templates, mailchimp account, the landing pages, and your social media strategy. Just add your friends in your gmail account and start.
• Want start a business? Skip the websites, social media accounts, instagram handles. Instead build your product and sell it to five friends. Ask them to venmo you for it.
• Want to start a restaurant? Don't think of the name, the business cards, the financing for the space. Instead, invite 5 friends over and have them venmo you $20 for the meal.

It's so easy to overcomplicate and to overthink.

We want to build the big startup, the huge restaurant, and the successful newsletter. But in the beginning you must be ruthless in keeping it simple, cutting all distractions, and sticking to your core objective.

Always ask how you can do it with less, how you can start smaller. Only later do you add on to it.

Trello is an amazing product. Created in 2011 out of an existing company, it eventually was acquired by Atlassian for $425 million. How could an web application like Trello command a valuation of $425 million? How can a website that allows you to create lists of lists be so valuable?

Good timing great execution

Trello was early in it's technological stack. Using a very thin web layer, templating languages, minified JavaScript, and Web Sockets, Trello was able to build a web application that was incredible fast, responsive, and could communicate in real-time alongside it's users. Whereas many apps were still static web apps in which an update required a page refresh, this dynamic web app updated in real-time.

It also was the first of its kind to use "Kanban" structure of information available to widely to users. This enabled it to remain a horizontal product: anyone across any industry can make use of a lists of lists. Just like anyone in any industry can make use of tables (excel) and an array of images (powerpoint).

It was also early in its adoption of application integration. Power Ups, or integrations via the trello API, allowed users to integrate their Trello boards with your calendar, to-do lists, or any other applications you might use.

‍Ease of use

But ultimately, Trello is just easy to use. And better yet its enjoyable to use. Anyone can start without much hassle. It's intuitive and simple. You almost want to create new boards, new tasks, new tags, just to delete them again. It not just solved a painpoint in how we can best organize our projects and tasks, but it made it fun to do so.

For products with a freemium model, where users can start and remain free, Trello is the north star. And as products become easier to test, faster to build, it will be the user experience that will differentiate products.

It won't be how useful is your product, it will be how enjoyable is it?

This quarter a new person joined my team. We've been focused on getting her onboarded, trained, and prepared to lead customer calls. She's very bright, ambitious, and she's made great progress. Yet when we discussed her first customer call, she was nervous -- she didn't feel fully prepared and was anxious about not knowing everything. But me being on the other end, knew her level of knowledge and knew she'd be fine.

Never feeling ready

We both realized she wouldn't feel comfortable until she ran her first call. She had to actually do it to feel comfortable. No level of knowledge or practice was going to supplant her nerves.

In all areas of life there's a cycle of growth worth exploring: That comfort, anxiety, learning, and action area all interrelated. When you're feeling comfortable, maybe you aren't growing. When you're feeling anxious or scared, it's okay poor child, know that you are just leveling up and maybe it's time to take a leap. Alternatively, when there's all action and little knowledge (or reflection), there's no growth, repeated errors, and you're too comfortable doing it the way you've always done. But when there's all learning and no action what's left is all erudition, fear, and paralysis.

Find the cycle

It's important to know where you are in this cycle. But more importantly, it's vital to know the best ratio of time spent at each step. There's no absolute answer, as it varies for each situation, person, and domain. But generally, I think it should vary between two approaches depending on your level of mastery.

• Just Starting - If you are just starting out, it's better to learn quickly and be biased toward action. You are likely more fearful and procrastinating. Don't spend too long acquiring information, doing is where the growth is. Learning chess? Play 100 games straight first, then pick up a book.

• Mastery - If you are closer to mastery, it's better to study and gain deep domain expertise. You know the fundamentals through repetition. Now its time to question your approach, action less. Experience at chess but stuck at 1300? Maybe it's time to study.

Of course these are generalization and of course they don't always apply. But there's power in knowing the tradeoff between comfort, anxiety, education, and action, and picking your head up to assess where you currently reside.

Over the course of the quarter, we built a customer health scoring models for all our customers. This provides a score for each customer based on different areas of their relationship with us: sentiment, engagement, adoption, support, and performance. After this, we then created content to address customers in our lowest cohorts. Our team, which oversees our self-service customers, relies on content creation, automation and scaled assistance, so these health scores are vital.

Technical Health First, Up-sell Later

After we created our health scores, we noticed as much as ~20% of our customers were experiencing technical issues with their programs. Without addressing these technical issues, further success is not possible. If we can be proactive in fixing these with clients, it will lead to higher scores, increased engagement, and greater and easier renewals. Our focus led to nearly 50% reduction in several technical areas of their programs.

But, we are also tasked with driving new sales, or pipe-gen. Our hypothesis was this: if we focus on these technical health customers, just by chance, we'll drive more pipe-gen.

But we were wrong...

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Stories vs tactics

Our outreach led to nearly zero new pipe-gen. Even though we were reaching out with value, being proactive, improving customer outcomes, it did not translate into selling new or more product. Why?

Two reasons:

‍Content

‍Our content was solely focused on fixing or improving 'X". So a CSD would reach out and would say "X is broken" and we'd fix it. That's it. We never developed a solid messaging style to mix in or append ways to do discovery and share outcomes. This may become a lagging outcome of our outreach, it didn't happen immediately.

Aspirational First

When discussing this with our VP of Sales, they shed light on their renewal approach. Instead of providing tactical advice to fix X, show them what they could become first. Share with them the vision of what they can become, providing them examples of the best-in-class customers are doing, and why it will make them a hero for their boss. Then, when they are bought-in, provide the solution they need and take action on the technical issues to get them there. Lead with aspiration and follow with action.

This is such an insightful approach and a guide for our future content creation. While we won't abandon our more targeted and technical messaging (this is automated), we'll shift our focus on our best customers and share their success with our low performing customers. I'm excited to see how this change will result in pipe-gen, but also still improve technical areas for customers.

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All of life is a compounding machine. The decisions and life experiences we have early in life are more valuable than they are later in life. Each day's value is not linear, but exponential. The same goes for every dollar saved, every relationship created, and every workout completed.

When we are born our potential outcomes in life are extreme. Aside from some data we have, like our genetics, family, location, etc., our life could end up with very different possible outcomes. What happens to us and the decisions we make along the way begin to narrow these potential outcomes over time.

Models

Models are a fine example of how we to visualize this. Statistical modeling is very hard due to the  number of variables that can impact the outcome. A great example of this were the early coronavirus projections. By April, there were projection of up to 5,000 deaths per day and as low as 1,000 deaths per day. But as we approach June, the shaded area begins to tighten as more data comes available.

Our lives are the same way. There is a very high level of uncertainty early on, but as more data comes available, the picture becomes more clear.  That data equals your decisions and life experiences. And the earliest ones matter the most. This study may indicate that the emotional support in the first three years of life - support you may not even remember - have affects in adulthood.

Not just money

We often think of compounding in financial terms. The earlier you save the greater time your money has to earn and grow. Each dollar added later has less time to compound, which makes it less valuable. But it's only common because it is easily provable with math. But it can and should be associated with all areas of our lives, even if we can't plug them into a calculator online: early decisions, first friends, career networks, and so on. It is a sad to think it, but it's true: doors close all around you as you age.

Fortunately, life is much more chaotic than compound interest calculators. People reinvent themselves, start businesses late in life, change careers, and so on. You aren't completely trapped by your previous decisions and current path. But it is a reminder to act with some haste, to get started today, because it is still better than tomorrow.

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