Brian Balfour: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, there's many camps, we're going to dig deeper into that topic on the podcast coming up. This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio, your agency has just landed a dream client and you already have big ideas for the website, but do you have the tools to bring your ambitious vision to life? Let me tell you about Wix Studio, the new platform that lets agencies deliver exceptional client sites with maximum efficiency, how? First, let's talk about advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you can build unique layouts with a revolutionary grid experience, and watch as elements scale proportionately by default. No-code animations add sparks of delight, while adding custom CSS gives total design control. Bring ambitious client projects to life with any industry with a fully integrated suite of business solutions, from e-commerce to events, bookings and more, and extend the capabilities even further with hundreds of APIs and integrations. You know what else? The workflows just make sense. There's the built-in AI tools, the on canvas collaborating, a centralized workspace, the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover, and that's not all. Find out more at wix.com/studio. All right, lesson seven. Lesson seven is use cases, not personas. So the trope I think is always to talk to your customers, know your customers, and it just puts a lot of emphasis on understanding the person or category of person. And then this typically results in creating some type of persona definition and segmentation that the team orients around. But I actually think most of the meat that is actionable, that helps you define, not only what to build from a product perspective, but how your growth motion and growth model should work, is actually defined in the use case that you're going after, and the different uses of your product. Some people kind of relate this to jobs to be done, we think about it a little bit differently internally in Reforge. Which is a use case is simply a combination, and starts with, what is the problem that you are trying to solve? What is the value prop that you're trying to create against that problem? What's the alternative for the user? And then most importantly, why are they choosing you over the alternative? That often goes mixed. Those components once you define them, what the extend into are the things that actually start to help you on the growth side of the equation. Which is once I understand what the problem is, I can start to ask questions, "Well, what is the natural frequency of somebody encountering that problem?" That starts to define your retention metrics, which then starts to define your activation metrics, and it kind of works all the way downstream. You can also ask the question, "Well, what is the natural frequency of adoption of a solution around this problem?" A lot of people don't think about that. Especially in SaaS tools, which is for most SaaS products, your persona, your target customer, it actually only in market for that once every fewish years or so. And as a result, what most people end up focusing on is just trying to capture that small sliver of those that are in market. And they don't think about, well, how do I capture the attention and build a relationship with folks that aren't in market yet, but are going to be eventually? And that was HubSpot's biggest thing when they developed the whole inbound marketing playbook and content marketing, is that most people thought of HubSpot, they just thought of them as a blog. They didn't even know that they was a SaaS tool, if you asked our audience. But what that created was the moment they were in market for that tool, where was the first place that they were going to go? They were going to go to HubSpot, and they were like, "Oh, I already have a relationship with this brand." And that ended up reducing quite a bit of friction. The reality is that most products today are actually adopted by multiple personas, and that leads to trying to solve for multiple use cases, multiple problems across these personas. And I think that is the way more detrimental thing, than narrowing in on a single use case that might be adopted by multiple personas. for multiple use cases, multiple problems across these personas. And I think that is the way more detrimental thing, than narrowing in on a single use case that might be adopted by multiple personas. So it's kind of flipping it on its head. So that's how we define everything in Reforge, is essentially, what are the different use cases that we are trying to build against? And then we might go ask the question, "Who has those problems? Who has those use cases?" And most of the time we've actually been surprised that there are people in the market that have those problems, and that have those use cases, that we would not have identified through any sort of persona research, but we can make those people successful. We can capture those people as part of the process.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.