How to Know If Your Marketing Is Built on Guesswork | Will Gadsby Peet

Will Gadsby Peet has been a fractional CMO across hundreds of business models. The pattern he keeps coming back to has nothing to do with channels, budgets, or agencies.

Most founders lose touch with the one thing that made their early growth work — and then wonder why the expensive new hire isn't delivering. Will and James get into what that thing is, what it looks like when a founder gets it right, and the practical system any founder can build right now regardless of where they are with marketing. Specific, a little uncomfortable, and worth it.

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Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, I'm James Johnson, founder and CEO coach, and this is the Pure Effect, the podcast where your peers will tell you what's unlocking their 10 million plus business. In today's episode, Will and I will dive into what role of founder best players of marketing and the power of customer interviews. Remember to hit the subscribe button before we get started. And now on with the show. So Will, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Mate, longtime listener, first-time guest. It's a pretty pretty exciting moment for me.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

I wish everyone said that when they kicked off. But the So we're going to talk today a bit about so what founders how founders get the most out of marketing as they scale. But probably be useful to start with your origin story. What brought you to this point?

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Yeah, so uh former journalist, incredibly a women's lifestyle journalist, if you can believe that, with all of this going on. But I was, yeah, I was a very bushy-tailed and bright-eyed per journalist who thought he was gonna be a war correspondent, then realized that was insane. Went into marketing because obviously the skill set is almost exactly the same. It's just in journalism, you're trying to tell a story, and that's the point. Marketing, you're trying to tell a story and then sell something at the end. So it was very analogous, and obviously had learned a lot about SEO in journalism. Then did like sort of seven to eight years as a marketing career, founded a marketing agency that you were the net of, which is how we know each other. Scaled that to about eight or nine people until leaving that, sort of exiting that about two and a half years ago. And then in the last two and a half years, I've been I've been a fractional CMO for a range of great clients. And so, yeah, really the last god, nearly 15 years, it's been nothing but content, storytelling, and and marketing.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

I I imagine you've seen quite a lot in that space-time, uh, just quite a lot of change, but just quite a lot of like what's done right and what's done wrong.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah, I mean, so from insane things like it's mad to think this, but like me and you remember how incredible it was to have a mobile phone for the first time and like be at school playing Snake in the playground. I remember the advent of Facebook, I remember then five years later, Facebook ads game changer. So yeah, it's been in digital marketing, five years is a lifetime. So it's been incredible just in terms of the platform changes. And then from my side, I've actually been really blessed. Like, I think one of my most the most valuable things I give my clients is I have touched hundreds of business models across e-commerce through to really complicated long-form professional services. So, really have a very like big picture view of all the different types of marketing you can do. I think a lot of marketers fall into the trap of like, well, I had a really successful time with e-commerce running TikTok ads, and now this is what I suggest to anyone in e-commerce. Whereas I've had ups and downs through various business models and lots of different platforms. So, yeah, when I go look, I think it's these three channels. It's a lot of experience, it's not just those are the three channels that I know how to run.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

That's where it's a bit like to what I do. That is you you need to have that breadth to be able to go, okay. I've made a lot of mistakes and I've seen a lot of different things. This is quite hard, hard won advice.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

All a founder really wants is like, don't worry, mate, like I've done this before. Like I like I've done this for someone who looks very similar to you in terms of business model. It did work. This is we're all okay here. In fact, I've done this two or three times for people who like your business model. That's we're all gonna, it's gonna be fine. Rather than and I again, I think this is, and we'll get into it in a bit about like scaling in marketing. Quite often you probably have a 28, 29, 30-year-old marketing manager who's kind of filling in the head of marketing role, and it's all just theory. That hard won experience is gold dust to a founder. And quite often I actually feel a little bad. Like I come in, basically just go, Yeah, everything your marketing manager was saying is right. They're just 28 and you didn't listen to them. But here's how we're actually gonna do it, and they were wrong about this one thing, that would have been a massive mistake.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Better to press three levers really well and without too much experimentation, well, just could be part. I imagine there's still quite a lot of experimentation. But if you can skip six months of experimentation, if you're a Series A and you've got two two years to get to the next stage, that's like 25% of your time.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

And like all strat, like I say there's some great books on strategy. What's the incredible one that I don't remember? It's in here somewhere, but it that he has a line in it which is just like 90% of strategy is knowing what to say no to. It's like you have the entire blank canvas in front of you. Three colours are gonna make up the entire painting. That's what strategy is. And within the giant oceans of digital marketing, you could spend two years doing nothing but ad and people do, experimenting with Instagram created. Like it the it's the I the idea of throwing everything at the wall and coming back with the data is it you can do it if you have a lot of money, but you're yeah, it's it is the most inefficient way to do marketing, whatever size you are. So, yeah, knowing the three channels and then experimenting and testing and learning with them, yeah, it's a shortcut, like a massive shortcut in time and money.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

So, I mean, let's jump on then to what founders. What's a founder's role in marketing as you scale? Because you say that you get the stage where they've got to a startup, they're into scale-up phase, they're looking for their growth leaver, they might have identified one. What is a what's a founder's role to play in this?

SPEAKER_01 5:24

So it it's interesting, like I don't know whether you'd agree with it, but I would say it's almost the same role for any department, which is to be part of the conversation, but not the in the weeds driving the entire thing. And most importantly, in my opinion, it's to be the voice of the customer. I think however you've got to two million, they've probably had to be their own head of marketing for a little bit. They've then probably been kind of again, and apologies, these are massive generalizations, but they are trends I often see. They've probably been babysitting a relatively junior higher that maybe started off as a marketing exec and then kind of has been promoted up. It's only their first or second job. They've got to that point where like, okay, we've got a couple of things that kind of work. We're not entirely sure why. I'm ready to scale and either bring in an agency, hire a more senior person. The if they've got the right person or the right agency, I think the most important thing for them is to become the voice of the customer, to become the absolute champion of what the people who buy their product. I think one of the most common mistakes I see when people hire an agency is go, hey man, like here's the keys to everything we do digital, here's the some farcically poor personas of who buys our product. Could you go away and just come back with a 12-month marketing strategy that's going to take us from two to five million? And it's just doomed to fail because you're you know, you're saying a good agency will spend two months getting to the point that you're already at. And that's a good agency. They'll go, absolutely, yeah, fine. It's gonna cost 20 to 30 grand. We're gonna interview 30 of your customers, all of your internal team, we're gonna do a bunch of wider market research, all to arrive at the point that you as the founder are right now. And so that's what I think the biggest role of that there is. It's to not be going to a marketing agency that they've been recommended who isn't a good fit. It's to be going, okay, well, I know what who my client is. I know they're on these three to four channels. I'm very open to the idea that they're on others, but I constantly listen to them. I'm regular, I do five or ten interviews a month. I look at all the feedback on whatever aggregated feedback platform is, and I understand why they buy what we sell. So whether I'm hiring a head of department or an agency, the conversation is much more them going, so listen, this is what we care they care about. I'm almost shortcutting you to the point where you're now at my at my sort of level of knowledge of what the product is and what the people who buy it is now go forward and create a strategy that I can then review as a customer and sort of push back on, challenge, agree with. So that I think that's the biggest role in scaling. And I think there's there's a lot of my founders are, yeah, it's the most brutal job in the world. I did it for four years and it I completely burnt out. But like they have to find the time to speak to their customers regularly and to understand them. We were having a conversation about this the other day. The tooling to do this, like, there's there's stuff like Fathom or Granola or whatever you want to use for your sort of transcription and interviews. And then there's a tool called Dovetail, which is incredible that lets you tag in interviews with different sort of topic themes. It can also do some okay AI analysis better as with all these products as better with a human hand on at the tiller. But it's a very easy way for you to basically just have a conversation with someone five hours a month and have most of the rest done with AI so you can aggregate it all into a giant customer pool. And I think that is one of the most important things that a founder should never lose sight of whatever their size they are, whether they're at 200,000 or 20 million, soon most of the biggest mistakes in strategy, marketing, whatever it is, I think comes when C-suite, and in this uh example the founder loses touch of what their customers actually care about and actually why they actually buy.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

So it's really interesting. So when we come back to this, like practically how you stay in touch to a customer, because what you said there is like the role of the sort of CMO when they come and say, let's try these two channels, are gonna work, but also you've got a state where you feel that the CEO or the founder should instinctively have an idea of which channels they're gonna be from conversations and client knowledge. How often do you feel that those three don't match?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

More often than not, I think, especially if it's a technical founder who's built an engineering product, a SaaS product, they just don't want to do it. If they've got a background in product, that's more often a proper product where product marketing is a huge part of it and they understand the overlap. They built marketing into the product, the gamification, all of that. That's when it usually works. More often than not, though, I think a founder or a CEO is really excited to get you know what it's actually funny, it goes one of two ways. They're really excited to get rid of marketing, and they basically just go, okay, cool, this is your problem now. Come back to me in six months with twice as many results, twice the pipeline, and take themselves completely out of it. Or they because they are so passionate and know whether they've stayed in touch with the voice of the client or not, they're very passionate. And I do think one of the biggest problems with marketing is people think it's a really easy job when there's actually a huge amount of science behind behind this kind of fun art that people think it is. They basically quarterback the CMO in a way that becomes overbearing and doesn't get the best of both, where you know that CEO should be coming there with look, here's what the customer cares about, here's the channels I think work, but it has to then become, and so I'm not giving you a blank canvas, I'm giving you a colouring book with some guidelines. Now you need to go and take it the rest of the way. That's when it works. And my my personal massive pet peeve that's only come across in the last year, and please, if you ever find yourself doing this, stop, is asking Claude or any of the AI models, hey, I think this thing about marketing, could you basically could give me some confirmation bias that I should ignore everything my CMO has just said? And then they just I've had so many arguments where I'm essentially having an argument with Claude where someone's gonna like, if you put into Claude, hey, I don't think the website should be this colour, could you have a look and let me know what it what you think? Of course, Claude is gonna say, No, you're right, it shouldn't be that colour. What colour would you like it to be, founder? So it's a very tricky line to walk, because like I said, I think they have to be there as the voice of the customer, but they also have to be, it's really difficult to be able to let go enough that a CMO is running the ship and you've hired well, you've hired strategically, and they've get you've given them all the tools that they can to succeed, but then you've not either completely removed yourself from the process or completely involved yourself in the process to the point where it's killing everything. And I think that's I know I'd be interested in know what you think that must be the same across almost every department. It's like how do you stay involved, but you're you're not driving anymore, you're in the passenger seat, but you are helping to give directions. It must be true, it must be the same across HR, finance, legal, all of it.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Well, it's I think there's an interesting tension between being on the business and in the business and how you actually do that. So how are you on the business without being disconnected, and how are you in the business without just kind of driving everyone nuts? And I think part of that is deciding which how you're gonna remain connected to it. And what I like about this is it's like this feels quite practical doing it. I'm gonna remain in touch with the customer, and that can be my way of being connected. And so what I'm curious about is like how you practically a first thing, how many founders do you think are do have the information they need to be the voice to business? And if they don't, what is a good way of getting my information?

SPEAKER_01 12:45

So I think it is I think you're in the minority if you do. And maybe to we've been talking about this a lot from marketing's perspective, but it informs every part of the business. Like, so we're talking about strategy, and so much the strategy is knowing what to say no to. If you truly understand who your customer is, strategy is not that scary. Like, you just think to yourself, like, okay, I've had 50 conversations with the people who buy my product over the last year. Would they think that this product the development that we're about to spend 50,000 pounds on is a good idea? Would they think this marketing campaign is? If you've been doing the work, you probably can call them and ask. Like, it is so impactful across every bit of the business. And to get like to give you an example of just like the difference between people who do and don't. One of one of my recent clients who I no longer work with fell out of product market fit and they didn't know why. Like, like they just it, you know, it it they had I don't want to say enough for them for it to be them to be identifiable, but they had basically they had gone all in, including in their brand name, on a certain keyword that for 10 years had been really lucrative, really good, they'd made a lot of money, and they'd had really good product market fit. And then kind of because of social changes and some political stuff going on in America, that keyword had kind of had a war against it for however many long. And suddenly we were having some conversations around like, why isn't this working? Like all of the ads, all of the stuff that we built, all of the messaging is built around the the these things that we have a 10-year period of knowing works, and now it doesn't. And so they they had slept walk in slept walked into no longer having product market fear, which is it's that's such like it's such a problem. Like that's that's and so I part of the reason it didn't work out as a client is it was like, look, I can we can do some marketing, but like you you fundamentally need to almost start again because you this change has happened and we need to pivot your entire value proposition it's a nightmare because they didn't have a feedback loop. In contrast, a founder that me and you have both worked with, Charlie Green, founder of Romento, probably the most impressive founder I've ever worked with, and one of the most impressive human beings I've ever worked with, he had built a pro he'd spent like a year and a half developing a product that he then realized no one wanted. Like he had put he'd taken investment, he had done uh full professional product development, and he had got to a point a year and a half in when he went, Oh my god, this doesn't work. And so many people either wouldn't have realized that, had the self-awareness to realize it, or the courage to then do something about it. So he had a complete feedback loop with his potential customers, and he completely pivoted the product, and he spent another year and a half developing it into what it is now. And he's a massive success story. He's made tens of millions of dollars over in the US with a wonderful product called Remento that's sort of like a it's a way to capture your loved one's sort of life story before they pass away without much, they just voice note and then AI turns it into a beautiful printing book. But that they originally, so I said it's a smart way of doing voice notes, and then basically it turns it into a beautiful book. There's a bunch of other stuff, but it's not so much the point. But they'd started out as a physical product to be had to be used in the room with your family, and they realized it just didn't work. And so, because of that, he pivoted everything, built a product that did work, had genuine product market fit. And then when I he hired me, it wasn't he's a perfect example of where he hired me and he went, Listen, I know that this is product, I know what my customers cared about. Here's the eight archetypes that we sell to with like 15 interviews that I could watch for each of those archetypes. Here's the platforms I know that they're on. I basically built this car and now I just need you to drive it as it because I've been told that you're a very good CMO. And that was and it was a massive success. We'd like we had a I worked with them for about nine months. They went from six figures to eight in that time, and it was largely because of all the work he had done. What I could not have been set up more to succeed. Just like, yeah, cool. Meta ads is gonna be a huge driver for you in the holiday period. I know how to do that, I know how to do that really well with creatives. We're gonna we're gonna bring in some Google ads, we're gonna build a funnel for you, but like I know exactly what I'm doing. And so all of the focus, rather than spending three to four months just spinning our wheels and experimenting with different channels, was like, right, this is what works. Now let's go get some freelancers and you do the best possible version of these channels that we know are gonna drive revenue. So yeah, it was a shortcut, and he hats off to him, he deserves to be having the massive success he is now, expanding. We've got all these partnerships with like the biggest companies in America because of him, because he understands who his customers are. And I and I've not worked with him for the last eight, six, six to nine months. I guarantee you that man still speaks to his customers 20, like 10, 20 times a month. And if he doesn't, he has someone do it and then listens back to the transcripts. No matter how big he gets, no matter how much time it suck for him as the founder, he will always carve out at least 10 to 15 customer interviews to just listen and truly make sure that he is making decisions at the head of the company, whether it's marketing or sales or ops, that reflect the customer voice and him being the champion of the customer.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

So for these let's say you're saying that is that probably the quantity people should be doing like 10 to 15 customer interviews a month?

SPEAKER_01 18:12

What's if you can, his products he direct to consumer, so it's very easy to get if you're interviewing heads of legal, obviously that's not going to be that not going to be possible. I think the main thing there has to be a set number that you commit to doing each month. I would try to do five. And I think as well, in an ideal world, they're more like classic market research interviews where you know something like this on Riverside, where you've properly sat down, you got 30 minutes of their time, and you are asking a set of kind of standardized-ish questions. Obviously, you want to have some art to follow up with interesting roots and all that stuff that really good market researchers do. That's finding a way to do that, is it's in it's invaluable. And on honestly, so often so often ends up unearthing other opportunities. If you're speaking to your VIP customers, there's like just any excuse, give them a John Lewis voucher or whatever. It so often goes, Oh, you know who you should chat to? My mate Bob. Like like he would love this product. Like, you should speak to Bob, I'll connect you. So, along with you, they can quite often end up paying for themselves. So, yeah, I would aim for five, I would do them on Fathom, which is the one that all of the people I know who work in market research do, and I would combine them with Dovetail. So, Fathom will record the call transcripts and I'd give the summaries, and then Dovetail is a way of categorizing large swathes of video content. So, you know, if you've got the five minutes where a specific customer is turn talking about why they left, you've tagged it with that tag with churn, and then you do that for sort of five or six other customers. The cool thing Dovetail does is you click churn, the topic, and it will supercut from like those 10 interviews. Here's all of the points where the people you've interviewed talk about churn, and here's the common, it'll then also analyze stuff and be like, by the way, some of the common themes that came up was really poor client service, really slow response. It'll do a lot of that work for you. So, yeah, I'd aim for sort of five. I would use a combination of Dovetail and Fathom. And then also, by the way, in our brave new world of AI, there's so much stuff you can then do with that giant repository of data. If you've done that every month for two years and you suddenly have a hundred customer interviews, all of that stuff can go into an AI model. You you can literally uh some of the coolest things I've seen people do with it is they train a custom GPT or a Claude project, whatever your particular platform of choice is, they feed all of that data in, and then they can literally ask i interface, hey, what would my persona, William, think about this new marketing idea? And obviously, with all these things, sense check it with a human, blah, blah, blah. But it's very cool. And if you've given it the raw data to inform that decision, it will do a great job with it. We did a big market research project for for Charlie and Remento and created a custom GPT of it, and we were asking it web copy. We were like, hey, what do you think the web copy should be? What do you think about the order of this UX that we're building? And it had really powerful feedback, and that was like two years ago when AI wasn't anywhere close to what it is now, and it was still doing a hugely powerful job of just like, yeah, not that, this, not that, this. And then me and a professional UX designer looked at it and went, cool, eight out of these ten suggestions are gold. We're going to ignore those two ones where it's told us some insane things. But so you need to sense check it with a human to stop the hallucinations. But 80% of it was incredible, and AI is much more powerful now.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Just don't ask it what colour to do the website.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Don't ask it what colour to do the website. Don't ask it anything about what it thinks about visual branding or brand positioning. It is still terrible at that. Yeah, not a fan.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Okay, so you've got what what questions would you be asking this? Because this sounds like for a fan of listening, they're going, okay, I maybe I'm not speaking to clients in a structured way, one, or maybe I'm not speaking to enough volume of them. What sort of questions, or where would people get the questions to ask for these interviews?

SPEAKER_01 21:53

It's a really good point. Sorry, it's one just before answering that, one of the other things I should say is I would try and do sort of five ten structure. Market research-esque interviews. I would also look at where you can, where does this happen that you could add to the data pool? So if you have a customer success team that are speaking constantly to clients, forcing them all to do video calls rather than phone calls, and then capturing them, obviously, with the client's permission, and then aggregating them all into you if you're already doing a hundred calls a day with your sales or your customer success team, that's one easy way to add to the pool. I still think it's important for you to do the structured quote, but there's there's almost certainly somewhere you're touching your customer regularly. Just make sure it's recorded and pulled pulled out with AI. In terms of questions to ask, I mean, there's tons of kind of classic ones. You can find templates online, you you can um ask a claude and it'll give you a half decent first stab. But generally, I think you again, I just think you should know. Like, I get if you've built the business of two million, you understand what your biggest blockers and your biggest potential accelerators are. Maybe hire a freelancer market researcher to help you structure that into five to six questions, help you the more scientific part of it. But you should broadly know, like, right, these are the six topics I think I should speak to my customers about. Now, what's the most elegant question I should come up with? Maybe bring in a freelancer to help you with that part. As well, ask your team if you've got a sales team that are constantly selling and they're getting pushback on certain topics. You you can crowdsource within your company Slack channel, hey guys, I'm gonna start doing a series of five to ten customer interviews a month with I've got 30 minutes of time. Suggest to me the questions that I should be asking them. Your company should have the topics. And I again I think this is the sort of overarching theme of all of this is don't cede the things in which you are experts to someone else. Because the best case scenario is they take some time to become an expert. The worst case scenario is they just give you bullshit and then say you should do this, and it's really badly informed, and you go, Oh, well, I think they know better. So I'd yeah, I'd crowdsource them internally and assume that you, as the founder, probably have a pretty clear idea of like the five to six most pressing things going on. And sorry, last thing to say, and they should evolve over time. Your challenges at two million are not going to be your challenges at five. Yeah, you can start swapping out questions for other questions as new things come up, new seasonality appears. Again, if you're truly at the sort of cutting edge in the geist of your industry and the zeitgeist of your company, should be really obvious from your customer success team and your sales team and your own personal knowledge what you should be asking and what the topic should be about. And then, yeah, if you can figure out a way to fight standardise them into five or six, it just makes it a lot easier afterwards for you or an AI model to just go, well, they always ask a question about churn, they always ask a question about price, blah, blah, blah. It's much easier for me as a large language model to group all of those together and then pull out common themes.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

So let's say you're a founder listening, whether you're at 10, 2, or 20, you haven't been doing these interviews. But you might feel you have an i an idea of what the customer wants, you may not. Are you saying that before you go to a CMO you should have done you should start before we even have that conversation? You should do at least a month, two months, three months of customer diffuse. Or can you go straight to CMO and go, okay, can you do this bit for me?

SPEAKER_01 25:19

So I I personally think you need to do it yourself. Because I because you will never have the biggest challenge of all hiring. How do you ever find someone with skin in the game the same way that you probably give them equity if you aren't gonna do that? Yeah, you either hire a very expensive CMO who you just know has a track record of it, will care and have skin in the game enough. I just don't think they're ever gonna have your insight as the founder, as the person who's actually built the thing and flown it. I do think you need to you could and like you could co-craft it with a CMO and sort of maybe have them do it. I still think the follow-up questions, the structuring, it's always gonna be unique in the way you do it. And and maybe I maybe you could hand it off once you've created the SOP for it and they've got 20 examples of you doing it. But I I do think it's truly instructive. And to your original question, if you have those, that's probably one of the first things you if you are just about to start this. That's the first thing you should do is write down everything you think you know about your customer and then speak to your customer about hey, does this resonate with you? Because it because so often it it they've missed half of it. And you know, take this, take these with a pinch of salt because they're almost always quoted by market research firms. But like there is quite a lot of studies that have been done on customer speaking to your customers and doing market research for every pound you invest in it saves you like eight quid in the long run because it just stops you from doing so many costly things. Like it again, I don't want to. I have worked recently with a company where they have built six products in the last two years, and they didn't speak to a single one of their customers about those products, and we've gone to market with the marketing for those products, and I don't think there's product market fit. So it's just that is that is two years of a founder's life. The most valuable resource in the company is the founder's time. They've spent two years building products that I can't market. Like it, this isn't me just defending myself. But like the keywords that we think I'm bringing with audience off the keywords that we think are the right fit. Our whole theory of the case has been built in a really extensive strategy and philosophy and product, and that traffic's arriving on the landing page, being told what the thing is, and it doesn't want the thing. And if 10 uh sorry 20 hours of interviews might have said, Oh, yeah, it's kind of that, but it's also a little bit this, or no, we don't want this. Like you just straight up no. So, yeah, I think it is incredibly valuable to actually be the founder, and I do think at very least, the minimum you should do is right, here's everything, here's my entire theory of the case broken down into likes and dislikes. I am going to have this conversation with at least 10 of my customers to it update my thinking and then hand that on to a CMO in whatever guys.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

It's true, because I'm looking back at micro. I don't think I've ever done this. But I can see how it becomes very helpful.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

It's I mean, it's a relatively new concept, it's mostly only come about in the world of product. Like this is a very product thing, and product is only really 20 years old. So, yeah, 100% 20 years ago, the if you'd said this to someone they'd been like, no, like it's it was not common, it was not common business practice at all.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

But I wonder if if you had but if you had to take a guess of the number of founders who are currently operating who speak to let's say five customers a month in a structured way, what percentage would you guess?

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Well, and it may you know the world me and you operate in is mostly tech, so I it's probably higher within tech founders, whether it's them or they've got an a mechanism to give them that feedback, I it probably is actually the majority. I would say general founders outside of the tech world. God, I'd be surprised if it was five or ten percent. I really would. And to be fair to them, until last five years, it probably wasn't that it's it was a much higher lift. You have to do focus groups, you have to get them actually into a room. It's only the what it's really post-COVID with how much we've come on in leaps and bounds with video conferencing stuff like Riverside, that this has become much more viable for a £2 million business. But I do think it is it is gold dust for the because of that for the ones that do adopt it. Because the big the most valuable thing you have scaling from whether it's £100,000 or £2 million, until you get to that 20 million territory, is you are more nimble and more on the button than most. You if you notice a trend within that feedback loop and respond to it before some of the behemoths of your industry can, it's you are so much quicker into that niche. And one of the things that one of the few upsides of AI completely putting the customer journey on its head is it becomes much harder for companies to lie. AI has your customers speaking on Reddit, it has your customer reviews, it has your website, it has your competitors' websites. When someone goes, Hey, I need a CRM for a small business, and Salesforce try and this is from like 15 years ago, tries to pretend that it has a product that's for small businesses, AI just goes, Nope, absolutely not. It would say to it, This is from 15 years ago, it's not now. HubSpot's not actually that great for small business anymore. At that point in time, if AI existed, it would have gone, you need HubSpot, mate. Here's the website for it. And if you are HubSpot 15 years ago and you are on the on the button and on the zeitgeist before your big competitor, you can carve out a niche to the point where you're you almost then become Salesforce. So yeah, sorry, that's a very belaboured CRM example because that's my world. But you hopefully you can you take the point. Like if you are there and move first, it within a year you could have truly carved out a niche where you are a very specific solution to where the market has moved. AI will pick that up and it will suggest you over the bigger boys, even if they have more capital, more whatever. If you truly built on a unique product that solves a specific issue, it's better than ever to be that nimble first mover. So and you just can't do that without this feedback loop. The only way to do this as a founder and remove yourself from it is to hire a head of product and have them basically run this exact process and then believe them when they tell you that you need to pivot the entire strategy of the company. And some people would prefer to do it that way and hire ahead of product, but like I personally think until you get to the really big revenue numbers, it's probably better to be you in in the driving seat.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

Okay, so I'm about to think of the answers from the thrust of what we're talking about today. But like if founders listening to this shift. Put the headphones down after after clicking subscribe, obviously, first. Click subscribe, put the headphones down and go and do something. What is the one thing that they you think they should do straight away after this podcast?

SPEAKER_01 32:02

Yeah, sign up to Dovetail, sign up to uh a paid version of Fathom, sign up to a paid version of Claude, and then start asking Claude how it would they would build the functionality and the sort of SOP for this exact sort of process, and then just speak to either their sales or their customer success team about the first 10 customers they're gonna they're gonna trial this with. And before they take that first interview, right, bring in whatever their management layer in it is and spend half a day going, right, guys, what is every assumption we are currently making about our customers, both good and bad? Let's get them all on a whiteboard and then let's figure out a set of questions that we can we can stress test whether that is really why people buy or if we've missed the mark.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

Amazing. Well, this has been super practical and slightly horrifying to a big gap which has exposed in my knowledge, but that's all that's always a good thing. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you for having me. Remember to subscribe if you want more actual insight from founders scaling right now. And in the meantime, see you next week and happy scaling.