Claire Hughes Johnson: recommendation

Transcript context

…If you have to pick a couple things that you have to nail when you're just starting out before product market fit, what do you think is most important? I think really that early, keeping it very simple and being focused on that goal of product market, which is like what is the problem you're trying to solve? What's your vision?Everything you have to do for an investor pitch deck matters not just for the investors. By the way, people forget this. A lot of the story you tell to investors, early ones especially is the story you should be telling internally to anybody you hire. Why do we exist? What problem are we trying to solve? What early customers have we attracted, and what's their feedback. That's what you mostly need, but you need to remember to share it and don't just use it for fundraising, or don't just use it for a board meeting or an investor meeting. Use it internally. And I think you can get pretty far actually with that core content. As you start to... The first thing you're probably putting in place is a little bit of hiring process, and I think that's going to matter sooner than you think. Don't just be tempted to hire people in your friends. Think about what you need, what capabilities you need to build even pre PMF, right? And so as I said, there's a chapter about that, but I think some of the simplest versions of it is how do we evaluate talent? What kind of talent are we looking for? Where do we go look for talent, figure that out, and sort of train people a bit internally on interviewing. I think interviewing is not a skill that comes naturally. People think it does. It does not. And there's really basic easy tips and tricks you can find even on the interwebs about interviewing. And I really recommend... And my book has examples of rubrics, questions you can use. How do you really get at... Because it's hard to really evaluate someone in 30 minutes or 45 minutes. So I think interviewing some of your fun fundamental early investor kind of content you need. But then when you start to get some traction, then you're showing to codify and actually document what I call more foundational content. Because if you're pre-product market fit, you're probably small enough that you just can tell everybody all the things. You don't have to send them the packet or have them sit in the onboarding. But the minute that you're starting to get any kind of hiring speed, you're going to want to document it more and you're going to want to start to put some very lightweight processes of how you get things done in place, because again, you're trying to replicate velocity. It's easy when you're all in one room and everyone knows like, "Oh, this is the most important thing to get done today," hack, hack and hacking away. But then pretty quickly, that is not going to be the case. I definitely want to go one layer deeper on that, but there's this area I wanted to get to before we dive into some of the weeds around that, which is I found it really interesting that you started your book with this idea of personal operating principles versus here's how the company should work. It starts with here's how you should think about yourself. So I want to go... There's four of them... But before I get into them, can you just describe what is the idea of a personal operating principle and why is that important?…

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