Inside the Office
As I write this, I’m just finishing a conversation from my actual office hours. A student came by asking for advice on how to use social media as part of the sales strategy for his startup. And he asked lots of questions about what kinds of content he should make, how often to post, whether he should hire “influencers,” and so on.
We spent the next 20-30 minutes talking about his target customers and exploring different content formats, as well as covering some basic editing tips. When I finished, he started at me for a few moments. Then, with an obviously disappointed look on his face, he said:
“That’s a lot of work.”
“Yup,” I told him. “It sure is.”
I clearly hadn’t given him the answer he’d been hoping for. Even though he came to my office asking for advice, I suddenly realized what he really wanted was a shortcut. I guess he imagined I was going to reveal some secret combination of platform, posting schedule, and algorithm trickery that was going to make social media a magic sales machine for his startup. But instead, I basically gave him lots of homework. And, the more I think about it, the more I find myself believing “lots of homework” is a great description of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is basically just homework, but with one big difference: Nobody is going to hold you accountable.
Nobody is going to be checking whether you did it. Nobody is reminding you about the deadline. Nobody is taking points off because you skipped a part or didn’t show your work. You either do it or you don’t do it. More importantly, if you don’t do it, nothing happens.
I’m pointing this out because it’s why, from the outside, entrepreneurship often looks magical. When we’re not involved in the daily grind of something, all we end up seeing are the results… the founder raising millions of dollars or the creator with hundreds of thousands of followers. What we don’t see are the thousands of boring, repetitive, frustrating little tasks that made it all happen. And we definitely don’t see all the failures and mistakes along the way.
All those things are the invisible part of success. Unfortunately, they’re also the parts of success you simply can’t skip. Sure, having a good strategy is helpful. So is having a great team. And sometimes, you just need a bit of luck. But eventually, startup success is simply the byproduct of a giant pile of homework nobody is making you do.
In other words, if you’ve been looking at someone else’s startup and wondering what magical insight they discovered to get where they are, I’ve got some bad news for you: There was nothing magical. They just did their homework.
And then they did some more homework.
And some more after that.
Because… yes, startups are a lot of (home)work.
-Aaron
Worth Your Time
In a second office hours conversation today — with a different student from the one who wanted a magical social media acquisition process — a student asked me to name the best book I’ve ever read about sales. But, he was building a SaaS business, so, instead of sharing the best book I’ve ever read about sales, I shared the most helpful book I’ve ever read about customer acquisition.
By the way, did you notice how I went from “best book” to “most helpful book”? That shift was intentional. The book I’m recommending this week definitely isn’t the “best.” As-in it’s not particularly well-written or enjoyable to read. However, it was the first book I ever encountered that helped me understand what customer acquisition actually is.
Getting customers isn’t about networking or schmoozing or “chatting people up.” Customer acquisition — especially in the SaaS space — is about building a reliable, predictable machine. And the book that taught me that is called Predictable Revenue.
To set your expectations properly, this isn’t a book that’s going to teach you how to do your own customer acquisition. Instead, it’s the story of how Salesforce originally scaled it’s business… which is something that happened a long time ago. In other words, a lot of the strategies and techniques are out of date, so ignore all of that. Instead, focus on the machinery of it all. The original Salesforce growth team iterated and iterated until they found a process for getting customers that they could easily repeat over and over and over again. And that should be your goal, too.
For the athletes in the room, entrepreneurship is analogous to getting to the Olympics:
You see 10 seconds - 90 minutes of glory and think ‘must be nice to be born like that’, without thinking about the tears, the pain, the boring reps when everyone else was out partying, the injuries, the comebacks, the doubt. The ‘do it again.’ 😩
The good news about homework is that it usually comes with a plan to make it achievable.
As the OGs say, the fact that you have the dream means you can accomplish it. Go do your homework and ask for more - don’t forget the office hours help.
😎💪