Dharmesh Shah: belief

Transcript context

…We're just racking up all these very contrarian approaches to company building. I imagine people listening to this might feel like, "Okay, cool, I'm just going to build a bunch of stuff. This is great. I worked for HubSpot." Do you have any heuristics for when it makes sense to go wide and not deep that you share with founders? When do you think it makes sense versus now you should actually follow the common advice here? Yeah, so it comes down to what problem you're solving. So I think one of the mistakes I think founders make is that, especially product oriented founders, is that we fall in love with the solution instead of falling in love with the actual problem, and you need to fall in love with the problem and putting that constraint on yourself forces you to understand and at least label and define what problem you're solving because oftentimes we can describe our product or whatever, but we struggle sometimes as founders to describe the actual problem. So if you can make the case, which HubSpot did, it's like, okay, it's not like we immediately jump to that like, "Oh, we have this epiphany. We're going to build the all-in-one, do all the things kind of thing." We're like, "Oh, in actually talking to customers", we considered doing it like, "Oh, we'll just do this marketing piece." We'll just do this or whatever. It's like, no, that's not their issue, their issues it's not that these things don't exist, so if you, as a result of talking to customers and understanding the problem deeply, you come to the conclusion that you need to do more than just one thing, but then you should force yourself to have a discipline that we did, which is, here's why we're going to go a little bit broad, and here's how we're going to make sure that that broadness doesn't kill us. You have to have the self-imposed constraint. You can't have the best of both worlds. You can't say, " We're going to be all in one, and oh, by the way, we're going to be the best." No, you can't be the best. You can say, we solve this particular problem the best, but we're not going to have the best product along any of those dimensions. Amazing. I love this advice. Imagine a place where you can find all your potential customers and get your message in front of them in a cost-efficient way. If you're a B-to-B business, that place exists, and it's called LinkedIn. LinkedIn Ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers in a respectful environment. Two of my portfolio companies, Webflow and Census, are LinkedIn success stories. Census had a 10 x increase in pipeline with the LinkedIn startup team for Webflow after ramping up on LinkedIn in Q4, they had the highest marketing source revenue quarter to date. With LinkedIn ads you'll have direct access to and can build relationships with decision makers, including 950 million members, 180 million senior execs, and over 10 million C-level executives. You'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B-to-B. In tech, LinkedIn generated two to five x higher return on ad spend than any other social media platforms. Audiences on LinkedIn have two times the buying power of the average web audience, and you'll work with a partner who respects the B-to-B world you operate in. Make B-to-B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit on your next campaign. Just go to linkedin.com/pod Lenny to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com/ pod Lenny. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, I'm going to go in a totally different direction for now and see where this takes us. I want to talk about flash tags.…

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