Jen Abel: preference

Transcript context

…Okay, amazing. So we talked about how to figure out who to go after, how to pitch them to get them to want to talk. The next step I imagine is you're on the phone with them trying to convince them to actually care. What do you do there? How do you get them to engage further? One is you need to be vulnerable. You're an early stage startup, okay. The market, we're at a point now where the market is smart. I always assume that the buyer I'm speaking to is highly educated and knows way more than I do. So just have that perception because what I've learned is a lot of the market will play dumb, and you can get yourself caught pretty quickly. So when you speak to them, I would be very open and honest with where you are. Hey, I'm an early stage startup. We are deeply passionate about solving this specific problem. We have a lot to learn. Here's how we are thinking about it from a problem priority perspective. Can we gain your insight into how this problem is manifesting on your side? And then let them open up. Now you have them one, talking about the problem. Now you're getting the intel about their perception of the problem, and is it even a problem? When you say you're early stage and there's still a lot to be done, it is easier to be honest. If you tell them you have a fully baked, ready to go product, they're not going to give you honest feedback. It's very hard to say to a founder and look them in the eyes and say, hey, we built this product, can I show you what it is? You're just going to get someone that's going to say, oh, this is great, this is wonderful. But when you're vulnerable and when you tell them it's not fully built yet, even if it is, you will get more raw and honest feedback. Because it is easier to tell someone, hey, before you make this mistake, I actually don't care about that. If you've already built it, they're not going to give you that feedback. So the further you suggest you are, you're actually going to hamstring a lot of the intel, hamstring yourself on gaining a lot of the intel. So that's one counterintuitive thing that I think a lot of founders don't realize. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the developer platform for building native customer-facing integrations with third-party apps. Our native integrations on your product roadmap, whether it's to ingest context from your user's external data and documents, or to sync data and automate tasks across your user's other apps, integrations are mission-critical for B2B software products today. But building these integrations in-house cost an average of three months of engineering according to the 2024 state of integration survey, which results in difficult roadmap trade-offs. This is why engineering teams at Copy AI, AI21, and over 100 other B2B SaaS companies use Paragon, so they can focus their efforts on core product features, not integrations. The results, they've shipped integrations seven times faster, all while avoiding the never-ending maintenance that comes with rolling your own integrations. Visit UseParagon.com/Lenny to see how Paragon can help you accelerate your products integration roadmap today, and get $1,000 in credit on their pro and enterprise plans. That's use P-A-R-A-G-O-N dot com. So I had April Dunford on the podcast a while ago. I don't know if-…

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