Slack's GTM Expert Reveals the SECRET to Hypergrowth!

You would rather solve,the pain points, 80 percent for 1 percent of the people

your messaging, your positioning and everything, it should be like actually converting people into using your

products.

you want to try both inbound and outbound, for different products, it can work more effectively for one product than the other.

the point is more important than the feature itself.

Holly, my first question for you is what do you do and why is this so important in your mind that you do it?

I don't get this question very often. So a great one. So today I work as a interim CMO and a growth advisor. So I work in any given time was one main client where I act as a full time executive managing. The marketing team and marketing strategy, tactics, and working pretty much full time with one client. And then, I also [00:01:00] actively engage, deeply as four to five advisory clients where we go into both the strategy and the tactics. Go to market. so I typically work with, either the founder or CEO or the head of marketing to think through what kind of, marketing channels we should go for. , I would review their channels or strategies or plans, and we would discuss and brainstorm. , so I think, this is important because a lot of, founders don't really get, top talent for marketing, for go to market or for growth from day one, they almost have to, raise tons of money in order to get, top talent. this type of advice is really, important, and lacking.

at the same time, I feel, go to market is often. overlooked,from early stages. try to help out the founders.

I see. Thank you very much. so basically you work, to solve this main pain point, which is go to market and you closely with early stage founders.

Yes.

Oh, that's

Well,

actually I work with, primarily actually growth stage founders, [00:02:00] uh than, early stage founders. I have, some clients who are earlier stage, but primarily post seed,

I would

say. Yeah. Yeah. Typically I work with a series B to pre IPO companies.

Okay. For the benefit of our audience? How do you select your clientsYeah, it's typically coming from my existing network, previous colleagues or, or VCs referring clients to me. I primarily focus on, SaaS applications, horizontal products or products targeting a professional audience, typically, velocity, high volume type of, SaaS products, product growth, that type of products.

this is a niche that people know, me for and come to me for.

And you currently having your own company, right?

Yeah. I run a advisory collective where there are 18 of us. We're all previous CMOs and, heads of marketing, primarily in B2B SaaS. and we. Collectively have a different expertise in product [00:03:00] marketing, brand marketing, growth, marketing, et cetera. and then we sometimes go into project together.

other times we are, just, as a community, of advisors and, and people who will ask questions and help each other out.

[00:03:13] angelina-host401_1_08-08-2024_133642: So I'm curious, , can I with you or your team helping my product go to market faster and more easily

Absolutely.

Yeah, let's play that role. So I'm just gonna pretend in a similar stage. So assuming,

a pre seed early stage founder So minimum viable products is ready. pre product market fit. just launched last week. Let's say it's a consumer or prosumer product, AI SaaS application, for instance, text to shorts, like YouTube shorts generation.

so what should I do now?

yeah. I'm curious. What's their reaction so far?

So , that would be your first question.

yeah,my approach is, it's not a fixed playbook necessarily for everyone. There are some frameworks that I have, but I [00:04:00] typically ask, A series of probing questions just to understand better the products or the situation and then I can give a more tailored advice.

Is it better to share those frameworks? Or do you want to go down? my typical process of understanding your situation and

We can do a session on more conversational role play. This product, doesn't really exist.

But I can still make up things Let's say this product I released to, 4 customers and I got 2 paying, and then it turns out that they're all businesses. This is the current status. So I'm charging two businesses already.

however, I don't know if the profile of that two customers who are already paying should be the people who I should be going after.

why not?

That's a very good question. The one of the biggest question I want to ask you is about positioning.

The thing is with the first 10 customers, I notice that I'm customizing a lot, I'm trying to, do everything they want, on top of my main product that I envisioned. So that's one of my [00:05:00] problem. With deep customization, it kinds of deviates from what I'm building.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe I'll discover something that I should be building actually, but with 10 customers. Maybe I really don't know if that's where I should be. So that's why I do think about the first 2 customers. Should I go after people like them?

that's a very classic question. And what should I build and how much should I customize, especially for, more like a prosumer products, and you want the product to be more applicable to a lot of people versus a very, like a complex, SaaS product. Product that you charge, like 50, 000,for enterprise companies.

first of all, like it depends on what you're building. but,taking a step back, I think the two, Questions you want to ask really up front is

what audience am I building it for? And what pain point am I solving for them? so ultimately, these 2 customers could be, early signals or indicators that, yes, [00:06:00] they're paying you.

So you must be solving some sort of. pain points for them. And what is that pain point? so the point is more important than the feature itself. the feature is just like a means to an end, but the end is more important. So at this stage, you really want to not only look at people who are already paying you, which has the strongest Signal, but also talk to people who are interested or using your free version and understand their pain point.

And in addition, the prospects, the prospects who, either they have not made the decision to try you out, or, they don't know about you. You want to be more proactive in reaching out to, What you think could be your customers and do customer interviews and customer development to really understand the pain point.

Ultimately, again, like it's the pain point, not the feature.

, so essentially it is an iterative process anyway. So maybe it will turn out to be a totally different product from where I began, right? And the [00:07:00] only way to go through that process is actually talk to customers. The reason that I feel the first two customers I have doubt is because

Michael Skok,from Harvard and he talks about something called

minimum viable segment.

So he talks about. you, as a startup, you have limited time, limited people, limited resources, you have to cut through the market with a very small segment.

of pain point that you're solving. I probably don't want to solve all the problems. even for the first two customers.

But I do struggle with that concept of minimum viable segment. In an extreme example. What if the only, two customers I have already are the whole universe of customers I just, very luckily run into them in the first week. Should I think about this MVS at the beginning when I'm tuning my product?

Yeah. I in general agree with being very targeted in your audience, in early days. a lot of founders say, Oh, we're going after a billion dollar markets. we're solving problems [00:08:00] for every, professional, it is just not realistic. and, you're gonna be spreading too thin, and not very focused on actually solving pain points.

So in general,I do agree that, being very specific, and, you would rather solve,the pain points, 80 percent for 1 percent of the people versus solving the pain point. 20 percent for 80 percent of the people. so that 1 percent of people will eventually pay you. and, once you have one, that segment, you can always expand into other segments. and by then you already have a loyal, Customer, base who can refer you, and sometimes you can, cross sell upsell and all kinds of tactics can come into play.

So being targeted is important. But maybe whether this segment is big or small,maybe I don't have to think about it at this stage.

I think you want to think about, you want to have a vision of eventually where you want to [00:09:00] go. Eventually you want to build, I know you said, like a text to shorts, eventually you want to build a creator platform for all marketers. say, so that's possible,whatever X number of years down the road.

But right now I'm solving a very specific pain point, which is, like. Agencies with fewer than 10 people, who need to repurpose, long videos, for their. E commerce clients, so initially you want to be super specific like this versus eventually, yes, I'm building for all agencies.

Yes, I'm building for all, E commerce companies, or I'm building for all B2B tech companies. So that expansion can be gradual once you want your first pain point.

How do I find those people? So now that you just define my minimum viable segment, how do I find them?

Yeah. um, so let's say you want to find those like fewer than 10 percent agencies, uh, example. Like [00:10:00] the first place I will go just LinkedIn. Right. Like search for agency or, you know, social media agency or content marketing agency or creative agency.

And you can probably find like a long list of it. You can crawl them or LinkedIn has a sales navigator where you can add like accounts and people on there and you start building a database. there's third party data enrichment tools, where you can also. find people's email addresses and et cetera.

yeah, I would like for a professional audience and LinkedIn is always, a first place to go.

So that's one way of doing outreach, basically reach to the audience that we come up with together. That's cold outbound, How efficient do you think that approaches? How should I set my expectation?

I don't have high hope on this. also because I think cold outreach is very intimidating to new founders.

Yeah. I would say you want to try both inbound and outbound, for different products, it can [00:11:00] work more effectively for one product than the other. let's say. so inbound, I primarily, refer to, content. so you want to have a very, SEO optimized website, a blog post, section where you write, your thought leadership type of content.

You want to have, depending on your product, have some, tools like free tools or templates or some giveaway where people can find, Useful, category information on your landing pages. So you do want to build a whole system of SEO optimized website, and content system, where people can find you and people can start building trust by reading. The content, reading the thought leadership that you share. so that's more of an inbound, right? Like people find trying to solve a issue and finding your website. and the outbound is,you find a list of people that may be interested in you outbound, you have to do both. Especially in early days, cause, building [00:12:00] SEO is, hard. it will take time. sometimes you don't see anything or like very small traffic, attraction, in five, six months. and, you don't want to wait,

or if you are. Working in a very competitive segment. everyone is optimizing for,like AI video. so it's, really hard to jump out of as the type of keywords. but you still want to do it. but at the same time, you want to outbound, but outbound, I would say you want to be. methodical in who you are bound to, initially,we call this like founder led sales, right?

It's like founder. You are essentially a sales person now, that, you want to first identify your first degree. Connection or your 2nd degree connection, these connections could be your existing network, or it could be someone you really trust, who are either advisor or investor, or, you're really close to and then their. first degree connection, which [00:13:00] is, your strong second degree connection.

Oftentimes nowadays, like LinkedIn is such a, wild place where people have a lot of second degree connections that are actually not very strong. So you want to like, Basically, categorize your strong 2nd degree connections, and then, weaker 2nd degree connections and etcetera. So you 1st reach out to the 1st degree and strong for a 2nd degree, and then mobilize your existing network. other people on your team. there are, tools out there actually,connect the dots. for example, is one that shows you how strong of a connection you have with, your prospects.

So start from there.

Let me summarize. So you're saying I should consider doing both. So both inbound and outbound and for the outbound, that all early stage founders like myself are intimidated by so start with. strong connections.

Basically start with my network and start with strong connections in my network those who I'm familiar with, those are people who are probably more open to talk with me. [00:14:00] So start from that, right?that's the outbound.

So the inbound, create content, SEO optimized, put it on websites or other social media platforms, Uh, is there any tools that you recommend using like newsletter, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Tik TOK or whatever? Do you see something that's very good tools that founders should start with?

Yeah. Depending on if you're building a B2C, typically Instagram and YouTube are the no brainers to take talk. Depending on, of course, again, like your audience. whether your audience is on these platforms for B2B typically, LinkedIn, Twitter, Substack, are the places to go,

YouTube also.

Yeah,yeah,

Sounds like both strategy will take some time. Maybe I imagine, so I've been doing my YouTube channel for some time. So I do have inbound requests, from potential customers , but it did take time. the. outbound, for talking to people I already know, it seems faster. It seems like, people are [00:15:00] actually responding to me if I already know that person. Although that doesn't necessarily mean it can lead to a conversion,but oftentimes I noticed that, my friends can refer me to somebody who are more relevant and that's extremely helpful.

yeah, yeah, absolutely.

yeah. .

They, sometimes,will overlap a little bit. For example, if you are creating great content on YouTube, and then you reshare that on LinkedIn,you are repurposing the same content across your existing LinkedIn network, Twitter network, and you substack, subscriber base.

And then these people, some of them are, People who actually know you in your past lives and other people are people who are, connected to them, they saw through your linkedin connections, shares and comments and likes, but they saw your post. So that's almost a combination of you are creating content for inbound at the same time, it expanded beyond your first level connection.

Is there any recommended frequency of posting? Or sharing [00:16:00] content.

Yeah, I would say on LinkedIn, you want to post once a week at a minimum. You want to be top of mind for your existing network and build an audience. Twitter depends on the industry, if you are in AI, Twitter is still a good place for other things, really depends, and so that's when we, look into, okay, is your audience on Twitter?

How many of them? And what level and seniority and all that stuff? I would say,Substack, I've seen people, prolific, writers do it like every week and others do it less frequently, but do a longer, more substantial piece of content. yeah, actually like how often do you do your YouTube?

I try to post once a week. I also do LinkedIn lately. I've been really busy, so not keeping up, but I just took note of what you said, okay, post at least once a week, I'm not as active on Twitter, I post twice on sub stack, so I'm have a growing community on sub stack as well, but those are more, like educational.

So I don't have product [00:17:00] related content just yet, but you're saying that I should post those information out as well. , once the product is online.

Absolutely. You want to establish yourself as a thought leader, an authority that knows what you're talking about. You want to get people to start following you. And people who follow you typically have some sort of affinity towards the type of thing that you are building or talking about. So eventually they will be people who amplify your message, even if they're not your customers.

What do you think of the actual content that founders should consider posting? if I say, Oh, I built this product, come try it out. it might sound a little bit, salesy you're in my network, but you might not want to see it all the time.

Any, , suggestions there?

Yeah, I would say three type of content. One is, actually, industry trends, or your thoughts on the industry trends. so like, what OpenAI has released this week and what does it mean for the industry? AI video space, things like that. So it's like you want to add [00:18:00] your perspective on the current news or the happening or the trends, etc.

And you can also share, let's say like a paper that's really good, but not a lot of people have heard of it. And you can, summarize them and extract the learning from it and just share. So then you're like, You have your second level of, of insights versus just sharing a link.

so that's one that's like trends with your thoughts. and the second section is more like, your journey,your career learnings, your leadership learnings, your startup journey, and, sometimes sprinkle this, like a personal there. So it was like, you are seen as a real person. and people feel close to you. So they can affiliate towards you, but also they can learn something from your journey itself.

Either startup founders who could be your potential customers or partners. or, it could be people who may want to work for you, right? So like your leadership type of thing.

So that's the second bucket make you more human.

And the third bucket is more like your product, or [00:19:00] problem space. And that like you can sprinkle that in maybe like I would say like a 20 percent and you don't want all of your content is all about your products or promotion or feature launches, but you do want to have them as a substantial part of your content mix.

Well,have you look at the, recent, very, popular, AI tool called Wordware? it's gone viral on Twitter. I haven't tried it yet, but my understanding of it, it's like you get roasted by AI, of your Twitter account.

It has gone viral. I'm pretty sure all founders have thought about this.

How do I go viral? How do I go viral?

know, like part of me is, a bit, caution against, trying to find a silver bullet. I think a lot of people wanted to find this, Oh, just tell me the formula to go viral and then I'm going to everything is going to be great. if you talk to.

the people who created a viral video, besides like cats and kids and dogs and stuff like that. Yeah, [00:20:00] sure. Like people want to look at those, but if you are like a B2B founder, how do you go viral? dont know, andit's a lot harder. I would say like consistency, and valuable content is probably more achievable and realistic than trying to find some like hacks. And go viral.

Yeah, thank you for the tips. Yeah, it depends on Of course I don't know the tool itself.

So eventually viral is a way to get people who are interested. I have seen, a lot of products, generated a lot of traffic, but they're actually not your target audience. they're interested, they try it out for a fab, type of a touristy, interest, and then they leave, which is actually a very big problem for AI startups, which is, the retention problem, because, a lot of the AI tourists Find something interesting.

They register, but then they don't actually have a sustained need for the product. and then they don't pay for the product. I think that is an actual [00:21:00] risk of, very low retention of people who are, actually not going to buy the product. Become your customers.

so in summary, virality is can be useful to drive traffic. But it may not drive the traffic that is your targeted user. so we, as founders, don't think about optimizing for virality, right? it's not something that we should optimize for.

yeah, I would say 90 percent of the time you will probably, have a higher chance of success, of doing something that's actually valuable to your customers that you're trying to get versus trying to find a quick hit. however, it's possible that, there is a viral,component of your product and for that particular audience, that particular feature or aspect, actually works really well and that, yeah, that can work really well as well.

So it's not absolute.

Yeah. And, speaking of virality, from a VC perspective, my , limited observation in Silicon Valley, what kind of, companies can potentially get funding?

One is,young [00:22:00] founders with great pedigree. And second one is, um, people are looking for traction. So traction is important.

And then the third one is even if you are not making money, if you go viral, that is also something that people think, is very, a lot of potential or opportunity there. So those are the categories of. My observation that, VC would be interested in talking with those founders.

I struggle between the two. Should I serve the VC or should I serve the customers, And that hugely drives how I design my landing page.

What about your opinion on this?

Yeah. in my mind, always the customers, like the VC will come if you have customers.so I think a lot of founders, think Oh, I need to like, So just, to follow your question is should my landing page be targeting VCs or customers? Of course customers. Your messaging, your positioning and everything, it should be like actually converting people into using your product. Once you have these customers, you can, you have traction, and then [00:23:00] VCs want to talk to you. So, yeah, I think there's no doubt you want to. Yeah. Target your talk to your customers.

Yeah. the examples I heard, on a podcast today, someone who is a copywriter, and he expressed his frustration to, a coach, go to market coach or whatever, about,ever since ChatGPT.

T. Everybody is telling me that I'm in the wrong job. it's a dying, job category. the coach, who's actually very famous. He's David Prisley. he told the copywriter. he said, don't be discouraged because people are, telling you this, , the way you can position yourself when you are talking like networking with other people, you can say something like, I am helping, startups or entrepreneurs to grow your business significantly through content creation.

And I use a combination of AI and, my extensive experience in copywriting. so you're upfront about you are using AI and in addition, the human touch of [00:24:00] extensive industry experience. it's important. And the third point is you're telling your customer

the pain point I will help you is grow your business, it's not about I'm doing that copywriting job. It's actually about how I can solve your problem. I feel the same way when I'm doing my landing page. If I blatantly say I'm doing text to shorts, I think all customers understand that they get it immediately.

If I say something with a grand vision, that then that's tailored more to the VCs, so I struggle with these two messaging. should I have two landing pages? Which one should I use?

Yeah. Yeah. So there are actually two different things. One is the story you tell to investors when you fundraise.and that story, I think you should put it in your investor deck.and instead of your landing pages, your landing page is for your customers and your investor deck is for investor stories. Yeah, that sounds very absolute. but I've seen so many landing pages where it's [00:25:00] very grand. It's very it's like a great vision, future of work, but then no one gets what you're actually doing. What is actually the product? and then you lose people, and then no investor will care about you. yeah, so I think in terms of the story you want, you want to put it in the right place.

Yeah. Thank you so much. I've been through these struggles and I think those tips are really important. cause I don't want my , potential customer to tell me that. Hey, I don't know what you really do.

Right? Most customers won't tell me. Only my coaches tell me. you will tell me. I have no idea what you do. Right?

Um,and, that said, if you want to, let's say build a strong brand and paint a picture of the future to your customers and you should feel free to do so, but maybe, in the middle of your page or lower in the page or somewhere that's not like top on top, you want to be very, In my mind, descriptive about what exactly you're doing so that people don't have to spend like mental energy to [00:26:00] understand what is the product and then maybe lower you can say, Oh, we're solving the problem of X. So in the future, all creators don't need to, spend hours in editing videos, things like that. yeah.

and also,I think it's important to distinguish, use cases and features. I've seen a lot of things, a lot of times people only talk about features, but they don't talk about use cases. Use cases is like, how do you actually use this feature? meaning like the feature is text to shorts. But then the use case is,agencies creating videos for their e-commerce clients, or, e-commerce,startups, creating content for, scaled production. I'm just, like throwing this out. but like the use cases make. It's more concrete in people's minds. And so then they know, Oh, this is when I actually use this, text to shorts feature,

How concrete it has to be?

very concrete. typically you would have your, feature page, but also [00:27:00] you want to have a use case page or section where you actually paint the picture of Oh, there are like five use cases that you can use our features for.

So basically,

if I'm seeing how my customers are using, I can start with that, that's an education process, right? How I think a customer might be able to use some feature I can just describe that scenario and then maybe show examples or even little videos tutorials or gif to visualize that so people can resonate with the use case more right?

Yeah. Now. I know that I have to put my grand vision landing page in my pitch deck and my customer centric landing page. Publicly available.

okay. what do you think of, founders should think about competitors? that's a really good question. The, the market research, is absolutely necessary and it should be done, even before you start creating your product. competitor can mean different things. One is Direct competitor, who are building the same things, who are offering the similar features or [00:28:00] functionalities as you do. And then you have incumbents, and typically it's a larger player whose product covers, a bit of what you're building, but maybe you have a different twist around what's existing. and then you have replacements. Replacements are like. Either people just use Excel, or don't use anything, manual, right?

It's like the replacement is not necessarily a similar product, but people can always, don't use you,The, I think that these three buckets are typically how I think about, okay, when I do market research, how do I actually understand the alternatives and how strong are the alternatives? and am I building something that is, differentiated enough from these alternatives, for me to actually have a market? so I almost say even before you build an MVP, you want to think through these problems, these questions.

I have a follow up on that one. The problem for me is It doesn't happen before I build MVP sometimes, for instance, I said, I have first two customer who asked me to build something. But that also means that [00:29:00] it actually happened before. I completely understand what I'm doing. What market I'm going into or what is my positioning or my competitors. because, the timing doesn't happen like one after the other.

maybe after 10th customer, I realized. Actually, I need to pivot my product slightly for something else. my product at customer 10 is not the same as customer two. and it's going to be a different market, different competitors. That's why I felt like for doing market analysis and competitor analysis, I'm always playing a catch up game.

I'm trying to catch up what I'm doing. And where I'm positioning myself and I'm always changing, at least I go through this process. how do you feel about that? it's not like a, B school, case study that I know that I can do the market analysis and then do the MVP.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's,like we said, a very iterative process and it can pivot, 10 times before you actually find a PMF. so I would say understand the market. You still do your research. You still need to [00:30:00] understand, who are your current direct competitors who are the incumbents who may be going into your. General area. and you understand the replacements, but at the same time you don't stop, building what you're building or changing pivoting, as you need because, of them.

a lot of startups fail, it could be like, Oh, like a direct competitor who raised a new round of funding, but maybe they're not managed well maybe the next year they die, or, maybe someone like acquire them so so you can't really predict the future. I made the mistake myself. when I explore like a startups is Oh, there's already someone building exactly the same thing. I'm not going to do this. but then they die, the year later. and then, someone else did it, like two years later.

so I think these things always happen and you can't just like, even as a founder, you're psychologically like, If you're thinking about competitor every single day and trying to play catch up, but you're not going to [00:31:00] win, you want to beaware, of what's going on, but you don't want to be reactive.

I definitely feel that pain, like thinking about, Oh, somebody built this. Oh, like every other week, I felt Oh, we are too late in the game. so it's very hard, but I also learned that all products have competitors. I haven't found any ideas who has not been,somewhat executed.

You even, think about the food delivery space, right? It's like DoorDash is not the first one to go into food delivery. They're already, So many competitors, are strong competitors out there. but DoorDash actually executed well. eventually they became the market winner. or one of the market winners.

So it's until that stage, you can't tell who's actually winning. the team that executes the best will win.

until the dust settles, right?

Yeah, until forever, really. Even like today, right? It's oh, who's gonna win?

change, right? It could be something else tomorrow for food delivery, thinking about all the services in China. Any of [00:32:00] them to the U. S. and I don't need DoorDash anymore. Right?

Right? exactly.

let's look forward to that. Thank you so much, Holly. Real nice chatting with you.

and,I think this episode is full of useful insightful tip and very practical tips.. And I'm taking a lot of notes.

TwoSetAI audiences if you are a startup founder, or, if you're a marketing leader who are looking to accelerate your company's growth, there is this one name that you want to know, Holly Chen, and she Holly Chen.

if you check out her LinkedIn, she has a very impressive track record of driving transformative results, for some of the tech industries, most innovative companies, and she has established herself as a true expert. In the world of growth marketing, go to market, and all those kinds of things. So if you're a startup founder, reach out to Holly.

and thanks for, tuning in today. I'll see you next time. Thank you, Holly. [00:33:00]