YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Balfour

lines on the record: 124
first: 2023-10-05
most recent: 2023-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Very high. Other than that, just check out reforge.com artifacts. I'm pretty active within that product as well, and then unsolicited feedback podcast. Join me and Fareed Masavat on a weekly basis where we give unsolicited feedback to all sorts of products. It's a really fun environment. And other than that, how they can be helpful for me is just for folks that are in this space that want to be part of a development community, joined ReForge and listen to the podcast. That's it.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you can find me in a few places. My website, BrianBelfour.com, I write incredibly sporadically, so don't expect regular.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really rough. And I know he's going to break it. And I can do one of two things. I can either like go and intervene and stop, right? And take the toy away, or I can like get him to pause and get him to think about what might happen if he keeps playing with the toy like that. And then let him do his thing. If he decides to break it, he decides to break it. And he kind of learned, and he learns that lesson. But I don't know that framework has just really resonated with me because I think as we all do, we probably have people in our lives that have a very hard time kind of thinking for themselves and making those decisions. And so that's kind of what my view is, is like, by the time I make, you know, like, I don't want to be deciding the college that my kids go to, I want to help create the environment where I'm helping them get the information they need to make those types of decisions and make decisions for themselves.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like a spectrum, right? So consider your kid at age zero on one end of the spectrum and age 18 on the other end of the spectrum, right? And I think your job as a parent is to move them along this spectrum where at age zero, obviously they're fully dependent. You are making all of the decisions for them. And by 18, what you want to do is that they are making all the decisions for themselves. And what that requires is, I think a gradual process of helping them make bigger and bigger decisions over their lifespan. And you just end up being an input into those decisions. That even starts at like an early age, right? Where my kids are still young, right? They're four and one and a half, but the example I give is like, you know, I start to see a kid, one of my kids playing with some toy that he loves.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both my parents were teachers, and so I think probably they did not understand my entrepreneurial life at all early on. Yeah, I got that elsewhere. But I do think the things that I took from my parents were just a lot of lessons around like how to learn and that you can learn anything if you actually want to learn it. And I think that's probably the most valuable And that's something I want to pass down to my kids as well.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have my place decked out like yours yet, Lenny. I need to do that, but I have multiple of these of like the man in the arena speech. I do think that is the thing that, you know, I keep coming back to and the thing that I keep finding the value that I resonate with the most. And it's even what we try to build reforge around is like we're trying to build reforge around the people that we create programs and stuff. These are the folks that have been in the arena. They've gotten the blood, sweat, and tears to talk about. I just highly respect people who enter that arena and do that hard work. And those are the folks that I've learned the most from and want to spend my precious hours building for and spending time with.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Or they do boxer, they also have the shorts with the liner in them. That's the ultimate life act. You just reduce one piece of clothing and change.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I literally shorts underwear t shirt and this shirt all Viori and I just they just came out with jackets and so that's covered as well now I just need now I just need them to make running machines or something so”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not a things person. I don't like buying a lot of things, but I joke around with Adam Fishman is that I basically only buy Viori clothes at this point. They're just too comfortable for work from home.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually don't like, as we talked earlier, I don't like questions. I just like looking at the work. But when I look at the work, the questions I'm asking are typically breaking down how they thought through the work. What are the steps that they went through? What questions did they ask? How did they approach it? Because then I get a sense of how they might approach a similar problem internally at the org. And that's the thing I'm trying to gain conviction around is that if we give this person similar shaped problems that they've got the approach and process to, you know, potentially solve it. I'm not looking for them to have the answer to our problems in the interview. I just want to be confident that they have an approach to find the solution.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, God, it's so good. The other one is halt and catch fire if you want something specific to the tech ecosystem, especially the early seasons, I think, capture the pain of creating something new really well.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where he goes and works at Alenia. And he goes through this transformation. And you can just, you see both the pain and the...”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Big short. I don't know why, but I just, you know, I think part of the reason is a lot of those movies are about what we were talking about earlier is like a small set of people who did the opposite. They took counterintuitive bets. And for some reason, I just like that really appeals to me. In terms of TV shows, there's a couple TV shows that I feel like capture the pain of creating something so well that no other, I have just not found in others. The bear episode seven of season two is I think probably one of the best episodes of television period that I've watched that episode specifically multiple times.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite movies for some weird reason are all the movies around like the great financial crisis. So why I have no idea, but I not even the great financial crisis, but Wolf of Wall Street, there's one from the bank's perspective.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After having two kids, I get barely any time to read, read a full book. So my answer to this is going to be answer to this is going to be super old and historic. I will say that. There are these books that feel magical when you get them for the first time. I remember when I read Ray Dahlia's PDF before he even became out of the book. I almost felt like I was like falling into a secret about principles. I thought I was just like a very interesting structured way of thinking. I don't agree with all of it in there, but there's, I think, a lot that I've taken away from that. Of course, like Peter TL Zero to one book had that impression on me the first time. These are all, I think, like old recommendations. I think the ones that get to the root and like incredible first principles thinking and try to pack an entire life's worth of lessons into a couple hundred pages versus draw one lesson out over a couple hundred pages, those are the books that I've walked away with the most.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as we mentioned, we'd love folks to have artifacts unreforged, things that I've actually created that our values like our original business hypothesis doc and stuff that you can go to reforge around on this. And so if you want to dig deeper into them, sign up for that. It's free and would love for folks to check that out.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I learned a ton even from my brief time there. But yeah, that company has been through, has executed so well over a long period of time. It's just like, yeah, so many lessons there that I took away and I'm sure exist that I don't have knowledge of now because I haven't been there in some time.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in that CRM's, I don't know, seven years old, six years old now, right? But there were eight years of investment in getting people to know them as a marketing company before that, right? And so just overcoming that inertia is, yeah, you've got to do things like what Brian did with the TRIPS product to really get it to start to take hold.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is especially prevalent when you're going from single to multi product or you're going through like a messaging and positioning change, right? Because you've probably invested in one type of message or trying to tell people what you do for years probably, right? And just because you launch it new, right, it doesn't, it's still going to take years for people to learn what you are at the new thing. And so I was catching up with one of the founders of HubSpot a while back, right? And, you know, many years later, even though they have seven different products now in their product suite, a lot of them still refer to them as like marketing, automation, email marketing companies.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing, but you have to be very quick to support and continue to provide that activation energy and not be incredibly incremental as you step into and lean into that thing. But the net result of this is like, I think a lot of folks think these new bets are going to come and save them in a much shorter time period than they actually takes them to play out because of this dynamic of like, hey, you have this inertia of an existing machine. Well, guess what? Like if you want the new thing to take in effect, like its slope on its line has to be a much steeper slope than whatever your baseline thing is. And I think that's just something that people tend to overlook and something I've overlooked historically as well.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so maybe they try to diversify away and their next bet is on SEO. Well, you have to inject it with enough activation energy for that SEO to be growing at a multiple of however rate you're growing at paid acquisition to grow up and make a meaningful impact and actually achieve your ultimate goal, which is diversify away from this channel. Now, the hard part about this is kind of going back to our earlier one, which is like, you don't pile all of this activation energy on at once because that tends to just be too much money, too many people, too many voices in the equation around new things. And instead, like you, what I always say is like, you can flow through the steps faster when you have like an existing baseline or an existing business to grow off of, but you can't skip steps on new things. So you still have to start with that small team getting fit on that new.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growth channel or something else. And you're trying to layer on something new or make a change. Well, that existing business, that existing growth channel probably has some baseline growth rate. Call it 50% year over year. It could be anything. Well, for that new thing to actually make a meaningful impact and help you drive the whole thing forward, it has to be growing at a multiple of 50% year over year in order for it to like catch up and actually start to show up in the numbers, start to show up for customers and all of those things. So an easy example of this is like I've seen a lot of businesses where it's been primarily driven by paid marketing, right? And they have like a lot of fast growth. And at some point, of course, they're like, ah, we got to diversify away from this. It's too risky. CACs are rising. Like all the typical things that we talk about and problems with paid market.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number 10 we chose because I felt like it was fairly relevant for the times. So I think where we're at in the ecosystem of things right now, especially among a lot of startups is that people are in this process of seeing that, look, they had some things that were kind of working but not working fully. And as a result, they have to layer on some new bets. They have to figure out some new things. And this also goes for even like fast growing companies as well. And the principle of the lesson is essentially you need to give 2x plus the activation energy for things that need to change. The mistake is like a lot of times people lean into new things. They kind of dibble and dabble. They dip their toes in it and they take it super, super incrementally along the way. But let's say you have an existing business, right? Or an existing.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, hey, nice to meet you. Let me tell you about this thing that's going disastrous in my life. And then the other person just tends to reciprocate. And that opens up the whole shebang. It opens people up and everything kind of flows from there.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, we do have new folks in there, and we do set an expectation of here are some of the types of things that we're going to cover and stuff. But that first dinner convo, it's like always myself or a few people who have been there before who are the first ones to open up the conversation or answer the dinner question that we might have. And they just like really set the tone for how open and how deep and how hard hitting we're going to get. And usually you do two or three of those people follow suit. And it opens up everybody else for the rest of the time you have, whether it's a meeting or an experience, like, you know, like we're talking about. So some folks on that trip have talked about they open up with like potential divorces or, you know, shutting a company. It's just, it's like things that you're definitely not going to get in a hello, like nice to meet you type of conversation. It's straight to the point.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to keep the examples to myself because we do have what is it like Chatham House rules or whatever for that trip, which is like we just don't talk about what we talk about there. I will say, though, if you're going to do something like this, the key is all about setting the tone.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas I think folks like Ariel and Aaron are like, they just provide a one-liner perspective to me where it's just like, oh, God, like I hate that you're right, right? Like it's like that type of reaction. In it and the question is like, well, what is that truth? But getting those statements, getting that feedback is just so hard because everybody wants to please everybody. So that's kind of it. So I think those two and those two have been doing that trip with me for the longest, whereas other folks have, you know, we get like new blood in there every year or two.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a few folks. Two of my former co-founders from a previous company, Aaron White, who's now the CTO of Vendor, and then Ariel Diaz. I think those two are both the blend of, well, they think so differently than I do that every time I get together with them, I'm kind of energized because they have just completely different perspectives or they've been playing around with different things. But on the flip side of that too is like They've also given me some of the hardest hitting feedback in my career, maybe not even intentionally, but they know me so well that they know how to like get straight to the heart of it. Whereas a coach often, a coach often is like kind of poking around the surfaces, trying to get to know you. And that takes an incredibly long time.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five days in Mexico, not only like getting to know each other, but inspiring each other with what all of us have been thinking about and accomplishing for the rest of the year. But most importantly is like we have these dinner combos that just get super brutally honest and deep with each other. And there's tears, there's laughing, there's yelling, there's like all of these types of things is probably the most productive few days out of my entire year at this point. And so I think there's actually a lot of ways to solve this. But what I often find is that when somebody is like looking, when they come to me looking for a mentor coach, they are actually better served by figuring out how to surround themselves with somebody that looks more like a sparring partner. Those folks tend to just be the bonds and the relationships that really push you for many years throughout your career versus some of these other folks.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At certain moments in my career, I had what I think a lot of people would call mastermind groups where I would get people at a similar stage of company as me together. We would meet bi-weekly or monthly and all those types of things. Those, I think, work for a interesting period of time, but inevitably some people evolve in a different direction. And so the group becomes less and less irrelevant over time to you. And so you basically almost always have to hit a reset button to blow the group up and reassemble it. And that can be like a decent amount of work. Oftentimes, these end up being co-founders' relationships and starting a company is a lot of times your co-founders are a sparring partner for you. Most recently, though, I've been for the past about seven years, been organizing this yearly trip called Recatalyze to Mexico, which is like this group of founders. We do it in December towards the end of the year where we're kind of like reflecting on the year. And we go spend like.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then somebody kind of giving me some advice from the outside. Most mentorship programs are extremely forced and not very fluid. You also tend to not share a common worker goal. You can pay mentors or coaches like by the hour, right? They're trying to achieve something different in their career than the path that you might be on, even though there's like some similarities. I think oftentimes those discussions just end up being discussions about generalities or like how to get promoted or one of those things. Whereas a sparring partner is like, I found like that person is helping me create and ship something better in the world, which is ultimately, I think, the thing that you're going to get judged on. So I've solved this in a few different ways over time.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blows back and forth, right? And the thing about that sparring partner is they probably share a common set of goals. They're probably also trying to get better at the thing that you're getting better at. They are on a similar level, but maybe have some slightly different strengths to you as part of it. They're not afraid to push and throw punches to help you get better, which I think is often missing sometimes from a mentor or coach relationship. And they're playing the same sport, right? So a PM and a PM or, you know, whatever, however, want to take this analogy. But the most important thing is they are in the arena with you. And those folks, when you find those folks that have that set of dynamics of the right shared set of goals, they're not afraid to throw punches with you, like all that kind of stuff. They are the ones that I've found have pushed me to a much deeper level.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson nine Find sparring partners, not mentors or coaches. As you can imagine, kind of being in the L&D space, I get asked for referrals to mentors and coaches quite a bit. And I've had mentors and coaches in my career. I imagine you have two. But when I really look back and I think about where have I gotten the most value, meaning who has helped me progress the most, it has ended up not being, you know, one of those mentors or coaches. It's actually somebody who I would define as a sparring partner, right? And so I think about this in the boxing analogy, right? Like a coach, once again, is sort of giving you direction, yelling at you on the sidelines. But a sparring partner is somebody who's in the ring with you kind of throwing.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of context and, but there is like anti-PM sort of sentiment at the moment, which is just a fascinating thing to watch.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, everybody's looking for that data point. I mean, that kind of started with, you know, Brian Chesky's words kind of getting taken out of.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Yeah, I think it's time, too, right? Like, I think when an engineer and a designer are building for another engineer and designer, they can get to those answers, get to those sense much more quickly, right? But I think it would. It would consume way more time if they're building for a totally different audience, right? That they don't really have a lot of experience or intuitive sense for. And so then at the end of the equation, you're right. It's not just them being unhappy, but they're spending so little time writing code or doing the design that it ends up being a less productive way to get to the ultimate goal, which is building a successful product.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are most used by engineers and designers? So it makes sense that they have an intuitive sense of what the customer wants. Whereas if they're building a product for, I don't know, like call it like sales folks, right? The engineers and designers are just probably not connected to that audience in the same exact way. And as a result, you need a specific type of way of developing product for that serves that specific customer. But I agree with you. And a lot of it stems from founder, but I think also a lot of it stems from who and what you're building.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% based on founders. I think the second thing is who your customer and who you're building for, right? Like that, the thing in linear cases is that they are building a product for themselves, essentially, right, right now, right? That product is designed for modern software development teams.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do product management at Airbnb, it was, you know, it was much more designer. From what I understand, much more designer forward. And in some organizations, it's actually much more engineering led and engineering forward. And in other cases, it's much more product manager forward. And there's different types of people, different shapes of people that help you create that environment and are successful and happy in that environment. But it's when you actually haven't acknowledged and defined those things is like when you bring the people who don't fit onto the team and then they're trying to pull the team in a different direction. And that creates a ton of friction. Creates just a ton of friction internally. And those are just frustrating conversations.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this also comes down to, I think, a common topic that you probably get asked about too. Like even in all your series about how we do product, right? You just did one on linear and there was actually quite a bit of Twitter response to it, right? Which was like this only works, you know, in this methodology. But there's actually multiple ways.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what have you done with that? Have you gotten better at identifying the groups to be like, you know what, I'm making this trade-off? And that's okay”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything's a trade off in work and in life and not acknowledging those tradeoffs and not actually specifically saying what you're not solving for, I think is, I don't know, that's where a lot of my stress and anxiety has probably come from.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here is it your family? Is it your parents? Is that who you're? That's okay if it is. Like there's nothing wrong with that, but let's focus on that. Or is it your friends? Or is it really an experience for you two? And because what you design and build around the experience that you build around for a wedding really, really determines. And then when all of these like edge things kind of came up, could ask the question, well, like, is this really for you or is this for this group of people or set of people that you've distinctly said like, you know what, we know they're going to have a say, but we're specifically not designing this experience for them. So anyways, I think this happens also in relationships to in work-life balance where people are trying to solve for all the things. Friends, the career, the kid, the family, the spouse, the hobbies, like all the things. And at the end of the day,”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went and worked with them for a few summers, and it was actually a phenomenal experience. I got exposed to so many things I probably wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. But one of the things that I learned in that, reflecting on that experience, is that the most miserable couples in the wedding planning process were the ones that were trying to solve for everybody. Their fianc ⁇ e, both sets of parents, the friends, that annoying Uncle Eddie that you might have. And that's where all the stress of the process came from. And the people who tried to accommodate all of those things, the ones that didn't have their like best experience for that, what's supposed to be an amazing and magical day. And instead, I think in that process, right, like my uncle would try to get them to essentially say like, who's the most important group?”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last piece is I've noticed this actually extends to almost all life as well. I'll give a really strange example. This is something that I've brought up before, but now a lot of people know about me is that before my life in tech, I was actually a wedding planner for a few summers in LA. My uncle is a wedding planner down in LA and”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watered down. But culture is really about being super opinionated and actually acknowledging this is not a place for everybody. And you've got to encode those values that actually say, this is a place for who as well as for who it's not. And so this is an artifact that we have live. You can see ours. And so half of our values are defining the value, but actually half of the values doc is saying, what does this not mean? What are anti-patterns to these values? Because those are the things that actually help us understand more of like who is the right fit for the type of company that we are trying to build and who is not right for those things. And those things get implemented.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To what we talk about. They aligned this was before my time. They aligned all the sales comp behind it. They aligned the success, they aligned all of the marketing around it. And whenever these folks came up in the funnel and kind of indicated that they were in one of these use cases, it was like, ah, you know, HubSpot is not for that. But I think this is where most teams get stretched and where most debate comes from is that if you haven't clearly defined who you are not solving for, you can almost always make a case for how this person or this use case fits the thing that you have defined. Now, the thing that I've realized is that this actually extends into a bunch of other places, higher and culture being one of the biggest ones. And I've seen so many super generic culture statements and they end up being generic because they are trying to accommodate for everybody. And so they just get watered down watered down.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enterprise who was looking for a more compliant marketing solution, secure all these types of things, still solving marketing, still trying to solve inbound marketing zone on the surface seemed the same, but when you got down into it was kind of different. They also had like this very small business owner that looked like the SMB customer. But there's a very big difference between an owner of a 20 person company using your product and that business actually having a head of marketing using the product and their needs ended up being very different beneath the surface. And then they had this like technical marketer who wanted to get in there and customize and all that kind of stuff. So they ended up focusing on that mid-marketing marketing, Mary persona and use case around the all-in-one. But the bigger thing that they did was they said, we are not going to serve these three use cases. And going back.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a bunch of adjacent use cases or a bunch of adjacent people. And it's kind of like, well, yeah, it's like 50% what we're solving more, 50% not. And so you have to like define, you have to draw on the lines around it, right? And so there's an actual AHS case study done on this from early HubSpot, which is early HubSpot, they kind of built this marketing tool. They sold it to a bunch of people. They were having retention problems. They went and did all of this research. And what they found was like actually they had ended up selling into four use cases that on the surface feel very similar, but actually in reality are very different. And the four use cases was they had this mid-market, they call it marketing Mary a VP of marketing who was like looking for a solution in like an all-in-one marketing solution because she didn't want to aggregate a bunch of point solutions. They had then had this like enterprise, I think it was like called Enterprise Eddie or something like that.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, if there's like one line that I probably repeat the most in a reforged course, it's this one, which is solving for everyone is solving for no one. I think this extends to everything in life. And I have a couple interesting examples from this. So let me start with like the product and the marketing one, because I think that's the one that, of course, I think everybody might be nodding. It's like, of course, of course, we can't solve for everybody, right? But that's honestly where a lot of product and growth mistakes, I think, come from. It's not about being specific about who you're solving for. It's about being specific about who you aren't solving for. I've found that is the thing that ends up being the one that helps being the better guardrail for a team. Because for some reason, when all you do is define who you are solving for or what you're solving for, going back to the use case thing, a lot of people start to like justify or rationalize.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source