Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedJake Knapp: recommendation
13 Jul 2025 Lenny's Podcast Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint (from the creators of the Design Sprint) | Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky (Character Capital)
“We know customers can understand these and they create a great starting place for your team to think about differentiation because you can quickly look at this list and start scoring where you think your product could be on these scales and you know that if you can use one of these, people will understand it.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jake Knapp
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 13 Jul 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…One of the most useful steps here that I haven't seen before is just a starting place for how to even start thinking about differentiation. Everyone's always probably thinking price and speed maybe. You guys have a really cool just starting list that you showed here. Anything more you can add here for helping people start to think about ways to differentiate beyond the obvious price and speed. And I don't know, a couple more. So I'm just going to jump into another startup here just so we can see what this sheet looks like with scores on it. So this is a startup called Mellow. Anyway, the standard classic differentiators where we start, they are fast to slow, smart to not so smart, easy to use to hard to use, free to expensive, focused to one size fits all, simple to complicated and integrated to siloed. And so you could probably argue there's these others that should be included or some of those should be taken off. But what we like about this is that it's a small set. They're easy to understand. We know customers can understand these and they create a great starting place for your team to think about differentiation because you can quickly look at this list and start scoring where you think your product could be on these scales and you know that if you can use one of these, people will understand it. But it also starts to make the team comfortable with this notion of differentiation. And again, we want to make differentiation something that all of the co-founders or core team can participate in. It's not just the job of the person writing the pitch deck. It's not just the job of the marketer or the salesperson, but we're getting everybody's perspective in on it and this is a great warm up activity before we start to write our own custom differentiators. Awesome. And then again, this is just inspiration for coming up with more ways to differentiate. Something that is a common question I think for founders is price as a differentiator. Is there any insight you guys have there? How often do you land on price being a good differentiator with the startups you work with?…
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