Brian Balfour: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. If there's one line that I probably repeat the most in a Reforge course, it's this one, which is solving for everyone is solving for no one. I think this extends to everything in life, and I have a couple interesting examples from this. So let me start with the product and the marketing one, because I think that's the one that... Of course I think everybody might be nodding, like, "Of course, of course we can't solve for everybody." But that's honestly where a lot of product and growth mistakes I think come from. It's not about being specific about who you're solving for, it's about being specific about who you aren't solving for. I've found that is the thing that ends up being the one that helps being the better guardrail for a team, because for some reason when all you do is define who you are solving for or what you're solving for, going back to the use case thing, a lot of people start to justify or rationalize a bunch of adjacent use cases, or a bunch of adjacent people. And it's kind of like, "Well, yeah, it's like 50% what we're solving [inaudible 01:04:39], 50% not." And so you have to define, you have to draw on the lines around it. And so there's an actual HBS case study done on this from early HubSpot, which is early HubSpot, they kind of built this marketing tool. They sold it to a bunch of people, they were having retention problems, they went and did all of this research. And what they found was actually they had ended up selling into four use cases, that on the surface feel very similar, but actually in reality are very different. And the four use cases was they had this mid-market... They call her Marketing Mary, a VP of marketing, who was looking for a solution in an all-in-one marketing solution, because she didn't want to aggregate a bunch of point solutions. They then had this enterprise... I think he was called Enterprise Eddy or something like that. Enterprise who was looking for a more compliant marketing solutions, secure, all of these types of things, still solving marketing, still trying to solve inbound marketing. So on the surface seemed the same, but when you got down into it was kind of different. They also had this very small business owner, that looked like the SMB customer. But there's a very big difference between an owner of a 20 person company using your product, and that business actually having a head of marketing using the product. And their needs ended up being very different beneath the surface. And then they had this technical marketer, who wanted to get in there, and customize, and all that kind of stuff. So they ended up focusing on that mid-marketing, Marketing Mary persona and use case around the all-in-one. But the bigger thing that they did was they said, "We are not going to serve these three use cases." And going back to what we talked.... This was before my time. They aligned all the sales comp behind it, they aligned the success, they aligned all of the marketing around it. these three use cases." And going back to what we talked.... This was before my time. They aligned all the sales comp behind it, they aligned the success, they aligned all of the marketing around it. And whenever these folks came up in the funnel and kind of indicated that they were in one of these use cases, it was like, "Ah, HubSpot is not for that." But I think this is where most teams get stretched, and where most debate comes from, is that if you haven't clearly defined who you are not solving for, you can almost always make a case for how this person or this use case fits the thing that you have defined. Now, the thing that I've realized is that this actually extends into a bunch of other places, hiring culture being one of the biggest ones. And I've seen so many super generic culture statements, and they end up being generic because they are trying to accommodate for everybody. And so they just get watered down, and watered down, and watered down. But culture is really about being super opinionated, and actually acknowledging this is not a place for everybody. And you've got to encode those values that actually say, "This is a place for who, as well as for who it's not." And so this is an artifact that we have live, you can see ours. And so half of our values are defining the value, but actually half of the values doc is saying, "What does this not mean? What are anti-patterns to these values?" Because those are the things that actually help us understand more of, who is the right fit for the type of company that we are trying to build? And who is not right for those things? And those things get implemented in hiring, and in all of these other places. The last piece is, I've noticed this actually extends to almost all life as well. I'll give a really strange example. This is something that I've brought up before but not a lot of people know about me, is that before my life in tech, I was actually a wedding planner for a few summer summers in LA. My uncle is a wedding planner down in LA, and I went and worked with them for a few summers, and it was actually a phenomenal experience. I got exposed to so many things I probably wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. But one of the things that I learned in that, reflecting on that experience, is that the most miserable couples in the wedding planning process were the ones that were trying to solve for everybody, their fiance, both sets of parents, the friends, that annoying Uncle Eddie that you might have. And that's where all the stress of the process came from. And the people who tried to accommodate all of those things are the ones that didn't have their best experience for what's supposed to be an amazing and magical day. And instead, I think in that process, my uncle would try to get them to essentially say, "Who's the most important group here? Is it your family? Is it your parents? That's okay if it is, there's nothing wrong with that, but let's focus on that. Or is it your friends, or is this really an experience for you two?" And because what you design and build around, the experience that you build around for a wedding really determines. focus on that. Or is it your friends, or is this really an experience for you two?" And because what you design and build around, the experience that you build around for a wedding really determines. And then when all of these edge things came up, you could ask the question, "Well, is this really for you? Or is this for this group of people or set of people that you've distinctly said, you know what, we know they're going to have a say, but we're specifically not designing this experience for them?" So anyways, I think this happens also in relationships too and work-life balance, where people are trying to solve for all the things, friends, the career, the kid, the family, the spouse, the hobbies, all the things. And at the end of the day, everything's a trade-off in work and in life, and not acknowledging those trade-offs, and not actually specifically saying what you're not solving for, I think that's where a lot of my stress and anxiety has probably come from.…

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