Robert Kaminski 🎯’s Post

My 9 biggest learnings building and growing Fletch from 0 to $1M+: 1️⃣ A strong co-founder relationship lets you go 10x faster. Having a daily sparring partner to figure things out is a must. Fletch would not be nearly as successful without Anthony Pierri 🎸 as my business partner. Because of the positive pressure and support we provide one another daily, we've covered five years of learning in one year. 2️⃣ Do ONLY one thing. I used to think that the hard part of entrepreneurship was finding “the right idea”. But I now see that the real challenge is picking a single idea AND STICKING WITH IT. 3️⃣ Building an audience is the ultimate leverage. Instead of starting with a product, start by building a bridge to the market. When you have direct access to your market, building a good product or service becomes 100x easier. And when it comes time to monetize, you’ll be playing on easy mode because of all the trust and credibility you’ve created. 4️⃣ Give 10x more than you take. Too many founders look at the value equation with customers as a 50/50 trade, and they struggle to build trust and credibility (and, more importantly, they struggle to make money). When you give way more than you take, you’ll make it easy for customers to buy your product. 5️⃣ Create and share content every day. This learning is not just about getting the attention of your prospects. It’s about sharpening your thinking and the rapid feedback loop. The trick is to focus on the daily process. Put in the time, hit publish, and the quality will come. 6️⃣ Personal health leads to business health. When I do the little things in my daily routine to take care of myself (working out, eating right, journalling, etc.), the quality of my work goes through the roof. When these things start to slip, even the simple things in the business get hard. 7️⃣ Delegate AFTER you’ve figured out how to do it. You can’t expect outside experts to go from 0 to 1 in any part of your business — even if they are experts in a specific topic. You have to give them the specific playbook you know works — and let them optimize it. 8️⃣ Quick actions > perfect decision making. Whenever Anthony or I come up with an idea for something new for the business, we’ll talk about it for 15-30 minutes and give each other permission to try it. If it works, we’ll try it a few more times. If it keeps working, THEN we’ll formally bring it into the business. If we stopped to analyze to try and get to the perfect idea each time we’d never actually do anything. 9️⃣ Love the boring work The media portrays entrepreneurship as a glamorous lifestyle where founders do exciting things every day. This is a lie. 90% of building a business is doing the boring day-to-day work: creating content for marketing, taking sales calls, and servicing customers. Ignore all the shiny tools and tactics—just get the basics right and be consistent. #entrepreneurship #b2bmarketing #founders #growth 

Many founders are delusional when it comes to building marketing programs and creating demand. 🔵 They live in a dream world where... Everyone loves their product and sales & marketing is going to be easy. They can go after every market at the same time with limited resources. They just need a sexy brand and a catchy tagline to get prospects to care. They can just "turn on" a multi-channel, multi-segment marketing machine using automation tools and AI. Having venture capital means that they are minted. But this is a fantasy world. 🔴 In the real world... The best product doesn't always win. Markets are won brick by brick — earning trust with individuals through a high volume of quality content. Your reputation is forged by showing up every day and putting in the work for many years. New channels and tactics are painstakingly figured out through experimentation and time. Venture capital is just a resource to help customers and not an end result in itself. — In the end, the choice is yours founders. Which do you choose to live in? 🔴 The Real World? 🔵 Or The Dream World? #founders #marketing #b2b #startups

Should your homepage messaging strategy differ if you are venture-backed vs. bootstrapped? Anthony Pierri 🎸 and I don’t think so. At the end of the day, your homepage is one of your most important marketing assets. It should be used to communicate a clear and compelling message to your target prospects. Yet, we often see many startups take the opposite strategy: Using a homepage to deliver an unclear vision and brand message to no specific audience at all. There is no more stark example of these two strategies than Slack and @Campfire, a 37signals signals product. (see image) Both are company chat tools, but their approaches to homepage messaging couldn’t be more different. Campfire is trying to help visitors understand the product and its value. Slack is trying to… well, I’m actually not sure what they are trying to do. My best guess is that they are trying to keep an executive happy, but who knows? — Some may defend Slack's messaging and say it doesn’t matter what Slack does on their homepage. “Everyone already knows who Slack is.” But I challenge this assumption. Yes, everyone who works in tech knows who Slack is. But does everyone who works outside of SaaS know about Slack? I highly doubt it. Slack has publicly stated that its TAM is 1 billion knowledge workers (the majority of whom don’t work in tech). And they have only captured 4% of that market (40m users). For a homepage that gets almost 1 million new visits each month, I think their current homepage messaging is a wasted marketing opportunity. — *Additional note: Anyone looking for inspiration for creating a super clear homepage should look at Campfire’s entire page—it’s a master class in clear and compelling product messaging.

Ultimate decision-makers really don’t care about your startup’s product. They have businesses to run. Investors and board members to address. Employees to manage. Customers to deal with. ❌ They aren’t going to read your homepage. ❌ They aren’t going to watch your product release video. ❌ They aren’t going to read your latest blog post. Yet, many startups target decision-makers in their marketing materials. 💀 “Decision makers are the ones that sign the contract — we need to convince them our product is important.” This approach ignores how the ultimate decision maker will actually engage in buying a B2B product. Decision makers will (almost) always come into the buying process at the end of a sales cycle. They will rely on the voices of their team leaders to inform a decision, not your marketing materials. — So the best thing a startup marketing team can do is target the ideal champion for their product — and get them to understand the differentiated value. This is the person or team that is close enough to the problem to care about the product. They will be the ones to translate the product value into the specific business value for the organization.  

Offer design and value proposition design are DIFFERENT activities. 🔵 Offer design answers the question: “What are we selling?” 🟢 Value proposition design answers the question: “How will we explain what we are selling?” While these two activities are connected in some ways… ❌ They should NOT be executed at the same time. Trying to do them at the same time leads to confusion and dysfunction in GTM teams. #valueproposition #offerdesign #productmarketing

Last week, I saw a brilliant positioning strategy… But the founder won’t let it see the light of day. Here is the strategy that the Head of Marketing presented to me: (For context: they are very early-stage, pre-revenue, healthcare space, founder is an SME in the space — a former surgeon) - Big market problem that everyone is aware of (and trying to solve). - The current product is highly focused on a specific use case.  - Identified a specific beachhead to penetrate (aligns perfectly with the founder's experience). - It is very easy to get meetings with key stakeholders in this beachhead (because of the founders' credibility). - Confident they can get fast traction and build out repeatable GTM. It was so well thought out, that I paused her and said: “This is approach is fantastic, what the hell do you need our help for?” Then, she shared the second part of the positioning strategy by showing a slide on phased product and market expansion. It was their hypothesis for how they might expand from this early positioning over the next five years, which included a whole new product launch in 2024. And she says: “My founder wants to market ALL of this — how do I convince him to keep our focus narrow before building product #2” 💀💀💀 ——— For founders reading this, here's the takeaway 🔵 Your vision, ego, and ambitions are the problem. And don’t get me wrong — you do need those things. But you have to understand that they will prevent you from building out an effective early GTM. 🔵 You should trust the marketing leadership you’ve hired. (especially if you’ve never done marketing before) If you don’t give them influence and control over the marketing programs, you’re better off hiring a junior marketer to boss around. 🔵 Expansion planning in the early stage is only useful for VC decks. They’ll provide very little help in initiating and executing your first GTM programs. For marketers reading this, here are my suggestions to help influence your founders: 🟣 Challenge their ego with logic and real traction numbers. “What makes you think we can build, market, and sell two different products at the same time? We don’t have a single paying customer for product number 1.” 🟣 Sell the idea of beachhead marketing from their POV. “Wouldn’t you want to go after market #2 with product #2 by being able to say that we already have 100 customers using product #1? We’ll be able to expand so much faster.” 🟣 Highlight the realities of limited resources. Scope what you think it will take to penetrate your beachhead market fully. Lean into real numbers of time and budget. #startups #founders #positioning #b2bmarketing 

“Our competitors have the same messaging on their homepage.” So what? “Well, we can’t say the same thing as them.” Why not? “Because our prospects won’t know why we’re better.” Why are you better? “Well, it’s hard to explain exactly why.” Why is that? “Because it’s very nuanced.” Are they targeting the same market as you? “Yes” Do they solve the same problem as your product? “Yes” Do they solve it in a similar way as your product? “Yes” Does your product do anything that their product cannot? “Not really, the products are very similar.” Then, what would you change in your messaging? “We don’t know; we just need it to be different.” 🙈 —— 👆 This line of thinking is why most homepage messaging is bad. Making your messaging different JUST TO BE DIFFERENT is the silliest thing a startup can do in their marketing. Remember, your homepage is NOT a selling asset. It’s a marketing asset. Its #1 job is to inform your prospect of who it’s for (target market), what you do (product capabilities), and when they’d use it (use case + problems). You’ll have plenty of time to talk about your “nuanced differences” once they: - ask to see the product (demo) - ask questions related to their unique situation - bring in other stakeholders for more input  - ask for case studies of similar companies  - trial/pilot the product #homepage #b2bmarketing #startups

Why is it hard for founders to craft value propositions?  😬 Because there are endless ways they could explain the value of their product. And almost everything hinges on one thing: 🟥 The framing of the customer’s problem. This framing will have a domino effect on how you’ll explain the benefits of using the product. (See the image for how this domino effect works for Calendly.) — So, how does a founder figure out which problem framing to use? Use this exercise to unveil your possible problem/benefit variations. 1 - Pick a use case. 2 - Select a product capability that helps solve the use case. 3 - Write down how the use case gets solved today. (current way) Keep in mind that there may be multiple current ways. *This creates a whole new list of problems and benefits. 4 - List every possible framing of the problem (related to the current way) 5 - Map every problem framing to the benefit of your capability. 6 - Evaluate, prioritize, and choose. Remember, when you are prioritizing and choosing the ones to use in your messaging… You’re choosing the problem framing that will most resonate with your target audience, not the one you like the most. And if they don't resonate with the problem, they won't listen to your proposed benefit. #valueproposition #productmarketing #messaging 

Monopoly strategy for early-stage startup go-to-market. 🔴 Phase 1 - Experimentation GTM Monopoly - Buying your first properties. Startups - Finding your first set of customers. *This phase is chaotic, and you likely don’t know what market (properties) will be best for you in the long run. 🔵 Phase 2 - Beachhead GTM Monopoly - Buying the same type of property to make a street. Startups - Niching down to dominate a very specific market. *This phase is all about establishing repeatability in your business — And to do this, you must ignore other markets. 🟢 Phase 3 - Expansion GTM Monopoly - Go after another set of property types (street #2). Startups - Expand into adjacent markets. The idea here is to use the market dominance of the initial segment to create another repeatable GTM program. —— Unfortunately, I think a lot of founders are terrible monopoly players. ❌ They make the mistake of thinking they can be in all 3 phases at the same time. Which usually leads to failure. So, if you’re a founder of an early-stage startup… Consider approaching your GTM like a Monopoly game by: 1 - Being aware of what phase of the game you’re in. 2 - Executing that phase to completion before moving to the next phase. #b2bmarketing #startups #gotomarketstrategy 

Founders asking consultants which market they should focus on… Is like asking a marriage counselor who you should marry. It might help think through options, but founders need to make the decision on their own.