Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Not to mention, one of my key startup lessons learned over the years has been to sell the things that have budgets. Don’t try and create budget fit into a budget. I’m sure there are emerging markets where the budget line item is not going to exist for your thing. But you’re so right that if there’s somebody whose job it is and they have a budget to spend, your life is just going to be so much easier. I think that applies to even coming up with startup ideas and trying to figure out a business model. It’s kind of counterintuitive. People repeat this mantra, solve an unsolved problem. It’s almost like you want to do the opposite. You want to look at problems that people are already paying a lot of money to have solved and insert yourself there. My friend started a company called Key Values. She’s been one of my best friends for years, her name is Len. Her company helps startups hire engineers. You know what, startups are hiring engineers just fine well before her company came along. We picked that idea because we looked at like, where are companies spending money? Where are they spending a lot of money? It turned out hiring engineers, hiring recruiters. It was a huge cost for their companies. They’re just willing to spend a lot of money on it. Within a year starting her company, she grew her revenue into $100,000 a quarter. She was living a great life. She made it look easy—her first time out of the gate. Part of it because she picked a problem where people had budgets. Right. I think the insight here is if you really want to overly simplify the sales process, there’s educate and then win. Educate people that their need is real and then once they are convinced that they want to solve this problem, then go win and be the way that you solve that problem for them. If you’re selling to people with budgets, you don’t really need to educate because they are totally bought in on solving that problem already.…

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