YouSaid · the spoken record

Patrick Campbell

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-02-19
most recent: 2023-02-19
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

“Yeah, so I'm on Twitter at Patticus Childhood Nickname P-A-T-I-C-U-S LinkedIn Patrick Campbell. I don't check my LinkedIn messages. I'm going to get around to it. There's so much spam in there. But yeah, you can find me there or just PC at paddockus.com. That's my personal email. So yeah, if I can be helpful or you want to see more of the data or this question or that question, we've probably written or recorded something on some of the things we talked about today. So I'm happy to send it over and just obviously want to be helpful. So yeah, feel free to hit me up.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing geopolitical thing this happened. Oh, here's my first instinct. That means this is bad. They're like, well, actually, there's this other thing going on over here, and this other thing going on over there, and those are actually connected, that's why this is caused. So that's helped me like, one, not get so pissed off at the news. It's also helped me, you know, I think just as a human, along with most charitable interpretation, just be like, okay, let me not overreact here. Let me like seek to understand and then react or respond versus react.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I shouldn't say everything, but most things are more complicated than it seems. And that's not like a sinister thing. It just means when that person's coming at you and super angry about something, whether it's your fault or not, something's there. They're having a bad day on top of it. You really messed up. You tapped into a particular emotion that you didn't realize you did. Or like, hey, there's, you know, even the story and the news about this politician's bad or something like that. It's like everything's a lot more complicated. And not in a, like it's too hard to understand way. It's just the first reaction you should always caution yourself on believing the first reaction that you have. And I developed that there because there's so many things where, and I was also my first job. So a lot of this stuff happens because it's your first job. Many people may have this experience at a different place. But it was like, oh, this.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read this article or something like that. So I batched that into a little newsletter, and it's just a Chrome extension that works really well. Tweet Hunter, I'm trying to be more on Twitter. I went through lulls, and now I'm like trying to be consistent. So Tweet Hunter is pretty good. It's got some AI fun stuff into it to make discovery better. And then it's not a SaaS application, but the last one is this Apple Watch Ultra. So I don't carry my phone anymore. I just don't like I found myself being on a computer, walking away with my phone, going doing stuff, and then just never being off screen. So I have this for when I'm not in front of my computer. And I'm this close to also doing it when I travel. So when I've been traveling, my phone will stay in my suitcase. But it connects if I need to make a phone call, it connects via Bluetooth, all that kind of stuff, but just trying to take my attention away from my phone, basically. So that's been unlock.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing. Lenny's podcast, Friends of Friends of All Products. Descript. I use descripts quite a bit. I use Descript not only for, it's like a video recording and editing tool, or you can kind of bring in video to edit, but it's got some cool features that I use it more than Loom a lot of times because it just works in my workflow not only for creating, but also for those quick conversations. K tool, here's a fun one. This is an indie product. K-tool There's probably other products that exist like this, but I actually really like the interface of it. It's super simple. Basically, if I'm online or someone sends me a PDF or something like that, I can basically choose to send that to my Kindle. So if someone sends me something, I could just choose to send and then I can batch all of those things into like a weekly newsletter that I can curate. So my Sundays and my Monday morning are just spent reading. So I have this weekly newsletter of like someone wants me to review this thing or someone wants me to.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's hard to answer too because at the end of the day, we'd all say Zoom, Google Workspace, or whatever they're calling it these days. Because those are the things that are so central, right? I got to give a shout out to Notion. We use Notion for all of our kind of documentation. I use Notion for my personal, all these things. I know Code is a sponsor, so I apologize. They're both sponsors.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I do all the final interviews, so they've already gone through a skill-based and they've done culture screen already and stuff like that. So this is more of the, here's why you should not work here, that type of conversation, basically.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly that most charitable interpretation piece. And I would say there were about 10% of people who kind of had like a zero tolerance policy for whatever the situation was. And I would tell them, I would say, hey, listen, we have zero tolerance for the obvious things, right? We probably all agree on those. But for this type of situation, we would ask some questions. We'd want to figure it out. We want to see probably some judgment around what happened, like how long have they been doing this for a while, that type of thing. And then we would make kind of a decision on what would happen. And a lot of times nothing would happen except, hey, like, you know, don't be an idiot. You're smarter than that. Use better.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a controversial one. I'm not going to be able to go through the entire question in a lightning round. But what I do is I do a mini, I do all the final interviews at Profile, and we did a very hard culture check in that final interview. There's a mini case study. It only lasts about like a couple minutes. I'm not going to go through it. But I asked them if someone in Slack responded to someone sharing something benign, like some report they found on the internet from McKinsey. They shared it in Slack, and then someone responded to that with something indirectly offensive. So it's changed over the years. Sometimes I say like, oh, they called it the R word. They said it was stupid. Like something indirectly offensive. And then whatever, and then I say, what would you do? And what do you think the company should do? And no matter what they say, I challenge them. And I always tell them, like, I've never seen that at ProfaWell, which is always good just to make sure they don't have a bunch of fear and, you know, this position. But it gave me a really, really good opportunity to talk through our culture.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have one that's recent, but I watch The West Wing at least once per week. So I've done that for a long time. I love Sorkin. I think the writing's just so good. So I'll just throw that out.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Progress, so yeah, it's in progress. I'll send you a mock up after this. But yeah, high output management, thinking in bets, going to the first principles thinking, I find that a good book to share with people so that they can, you know, kind of think about things and kind of get on board with that. And then powerful by Patty McCord, anything around HR, like to kind of break your brain a little bit about what you think about HR in PeopleOps, that's the gateway drug. That was the one where I was like, oh, we can choose how to design our PeopleOps teams.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have read high output management probably 20 times in the past 10 years. I read it at least once a year now. I commissioned a bust, a bronze bust of Andy Grove, so that's being done. I'm a big Andy Grove fan.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I will say is this is all still hard, right? So I'm giving some heuristics, I'm giving some benchmarks, but your mileage is going to vary. But that's, again, that's your job, whether you're a founder, a product person, an exec, whatever you are. Your job is to, you know, take in information. Your job is to kind of analyze the problem. And then ultimately, you know, come up with the best solution. And so I think it's one of those things that there's some hard truths, I think we talked about, but then there's a lot of this that you kind of have to evaluate it for yourself. So just a general, I may have come off like a know-it-all, but I understand that mileage varies, I guess, is the best way.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The commerce industry, the subscription e commerce industry. So all of that was to build this pool so that people were aware of us. And then over time, all of a sudden they're like, oh, we have a pricing crumb. We should go talk to these guys. Oh, we have this content or this retention thing. We should go talk to these guys. But I think the pool is kind of the future. A lot of people are still treating it as just this gateway between the top and the bottom of the funnel.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Timeline of sales. You should still have those things, but I want this pool of people who are aware of me and are using something of my product because at the end of the day, what better content do you have than your actual product, right? Even if you're a big enterprise solution, give them something to interact with. And then the other way to kind of fill that middle of the funnel is, I think inbound marketing is just becoming SEO and ebooks. Kieran from Hubspot gets offended when I say that, but I love you, buddy. It's okay. I'm still a huge fan. And this is just because CAC and inbound marketing has gone up and it's all about a lot of SEO. And we'll see what AI does to that. But this whole thing of inbound media, we got on this train about five years ago. And inbound media is just podcast video series. When we sold a company, we had eight different podcasts and video series, all very like niche, like pricing page teardown, which was a show about we collected data and tore down pricing pages, the good and the bad. We had boxed out, which was a retention focus show for the ecosystem.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interacting with you on a regular basis before all of a sudden their timing was right, and then all of a sudden they go to the bottom of the funnel. And even better, they opt into them. You don't have to keep, you know, going after them and doing sales processes that are very kind of churn and burn. So that pool of leads. And so the best way to create pools of leads, freemium, I'm a huge fan of freemium. I used to write articles about how freemium's terrible, so I'm a big convert. I wrote a book on freemium as well. The thing with freemium is CAC is still up over the past decade, but it's up a lot less than overall CAC. Customers who convert from freemium and become paid customers, the retention is typically about 10 to 20 percent higher than those who converted from a free trial or converted from kind of like a traditional sales process. And then on top of that, NPS or CSAT, we measured it through NPS is typically about double because they're converting on their own kind of timeline, not on some artificial timeline of a free trial or artificial.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The days of like just hiring a bunch of BDRs, not training them, not having them in account based marketing, not doing all these other things, those days are not here anymore. Like those days are gone. Maybe in some specific verticals in specific parts of the market. But here's the other problem. Sales today is so much more about timing than it once was. Because there's so much stuff out there, it's one of those things where people are waiting until it's the right time. They're aware of you, but they're waiting. So the question we have to ask ourselves to not bury the lead any further is, we need to make this like river of demand generation, like basically with demand generation works, but that's table space. If we want to be even increasingly more successful, that middle of the funnel needs to get bigger. That pool of users who is aware of you interacting with you on a regular basis. Like what if you had leads basically hanging out there in the middle of the funnel?”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is bottom of the funnel efficiency and top of the funnel efficiency has plummeted the past decade, like just plummeted. And it's not only because of the factoids I was saying before about CAC and all these other things and so many competitors being in the market, it's just one of those things that like”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pound for pound, biggest opportunity. Take a quick set back. Demand generation exists for more than just supporting the sales team. We forget that. So sales and marketing, you know, the past decade, right? It's all been the funnel or top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. HubSpot's trying to make it a flywheel, but marketers are still talking about funnels, right? And when you look at the data, it depends a little bit on the price point and a little bit on the vertical, but 80% of sales and marketing budgets tend to go to the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. So sales folks and like ad type spend, you know, field events, whatever it is, that's where it goes. And the whole point is you're trying to move someone from a lack of awareness at the top of the fund.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the early days, pre product market fit, this is all we would do too. Like, I would stay at the worst hotels. I would stay at hostels. But just to get to like, okay, I want to sell to these people, like the best information I'm going to get isn't in a Zoom or I'm asking them questions. It's going to be like, hey, I gave a talk on pricing because I was like a high leverage thing I could do because no one knows anything about pricing, but they know it's important. So a lot of people want to listen. But then afterwards, it's like, oh yeah, how do you think about this? Like, what are you doing for this? What are you doing for like all of those fun product-y questions? It's just really, really high leverage. And I think it's one of those things that, you know, that depends on your role, depends on your stage, but everyone can use something there.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so, so high leverage because there are a lot of people who will not answer your email, but will come to an event to meet you or meet someone from your team. Because it's something to do, especially if you're buying them breakfast or coffee or something like that. It doesn't have to be something that's extravagant.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone. I led marketing as part of my role as CEO. And so I did a lot of this and I'm also the one doing a lot of the content and stuff like that or like the face of a lot of our content. So I did a lot of it. But your head of sales and you just have to position this a little differently. If they're going to meet with a salesperson, it's the same thing as if they get an email from a BDR. Like they're like, I'm not going to figure it out. I don't want to deal with this. But if it's like, hey, we're hosting, like we're doing these lunch and learns right now. I was in Paris, New York, and London last week. It's probably why I'm so sick this week. And all of a sudden, you know, we did these luncheon learns. People just want to hang out. So we had 10 people. We had 20 people at one, 10 people, all priority one leads. And then we did these meetups with, you know, 100 plus people at each. Like, just think of that brand equity. And you just hang out, you know, it wasn't just me at all of these things. I ran the content, but then all of our sales folks were hanging out and, you know, doing their thing. But it doesn't have to be super complicated. It's just those touch points that people want.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like priority one, we want these people to convert. They're very good fits, all this other stuff. P2s are like, they're probably good fits, but they're just not as big. And then P3s are with a content play. They just love our content and stuff, but they're not necessarily good fits for us. And so people make the mistake. They push everyone to dinners. And it's like, I don't want to spend all of my money on P2s and P3s. And so breakfast and lunches are cheaper than dinners, meetups can be extremely inexpensive. Get creative. We like to do like barbecue type stuff or like, you know, not dive bars, but like the unique dive bar, I guess is the best way to put it. So it's not fancy. People just want to meet people. They want to talk to you, especially if you're doing content and things like that. The Lenny newsletter, Lenny Empire meetups. I see the pictures of those all the time. Like there's just an urge to learn from one another and hang out. So yeah, that's the biggest thing, get out of the office.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the budget doesn't have to be as big as you think. Breakfast and lunches are super cheap. We would push all of our P2 and P3s to like a meetup and all of our P1s, we would have one-on-one coffee dates. Like it's super cheap.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably a minimum of like 2,000 companies per kind of factoid and most of the time, much more. But prospects who meet you in person have 10 to 30 percent higher willingness to pay than those who didn't. Chern, for those folks who you meet in person, is typically 20% lower than those folks who have never met you. Expansion revenue is typically 15 to 20% higher. And this is not only in like hand-to-hand kind of sales, like coffee meetings, lunches, lunch and learns, this type of thing, but it's also in skilled products, so products that cost 20, 50 bucks per month. And so my suggestion is to you, especially in like a post, you know, post COVID, I don't know if that's the right term, but like in a world that hopefully does not see another pandemic in our lifetimes, you know, knock on wood, do meetups, do lunches, go to conferences unless you're Lenny who is not a big fan of conferences. But like get out of the office, make sure you get out of the office.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to give you a tease, I'll tell you what I think of Snowden after the podcast. So the world doesn't get to know, except that I'll tell you what my opinion is afterwards. Local strategies, local strategies, very basic. People like to buy from people. But we as operators get so excited about the scale of the internet that we forget the basics of humanity. Here's some fun data points. We did a bunch of studies on this. So prospects who meet you in person, and this is not just for profit. All the data I've shared, it's all global level data or segmented depending on how we did it. It's not like just our findings. It's like we looked at.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're also some of the most privacy orientated people on the planet. So, you know, that's worth a whole conversation. So hopefully I didn't throw too many grenades in this part.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, like everyone asks me about Snowden. So, again, not to get political. It's a lot more complicated, I think, than a lot of people think. It's one of those things that the issues that were brought up, obviously they got really sensationalized, but they're really important conversations to have. But it's not as simple as, oh, like stop doing this, start doing that. You don't have to worry about the NSA. The NSA is all outward looking. You should worry about the FBI. The FBI are the ones who get a little testy with certain things. And, you know, you're seeing that in the court cases and stuff like that. But just know there's a lot of really hardworking, very well-intentioned people who you might disagree in terms of trade-offs, in terms of safety and things like that.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just really, really good to go to different industries. Like all this customer development stuff, you go to any major retailer or any major e-commerce company. They have entire teams just dedicated to this stuff. Like Hallmark was one of our first pricing customers back in the day before we went subscription focused. They had 119 people in customer insights and research. And this was one of the reasons we were like, well, you guys don't need our help. You got enough people. But those are great people to hire, even though they don't necessarily have the domain or the actual industry knowledge. They have a lot of domain expertise. In terms of things I learned, I'll put it this way, not to get political. If I was in charge of budget, I would give so much more money to the intel community. I saw conflicts or heard about”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't have a formal program, but I love hiring veterans, either veterans of intelligence, so they're citizens, so they're not veterans from a military perspective, but like people who had worked in Intel or people who were actual veterans of different military branches, there's a lot of reasons for this, but I think that the intelligence folks, it's a way of thinking. Now, you got to be careful, and this is just purely my opinion, because depending on how long they were in, the reason I left is because it's the government. It's super bureaucratic. It was one of the most fulfilling jobs like I will ever have. And I was only there for a short amount of time. But it was just one of those things where it's just so bureaucratic. So the 15-year person there is not driving, they're not trying to change the world necessarily. They have a job, right? So you got to kind of be careful with that. But yeah, I think there's these really smart people that just think in a different way. And it's a broader point is.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a whole program there, and again, it's not like it's distracting anything. It's just, I want the Intel so I can predict what's going on, I can predict who to care about, who not to care about. But even then, like if you're a challenger, competitor marketing pages are really powerful. And the thing is, is your customers, especially in a denser market, they know your competitors exist or they're looking at them. Don't infantilize your customers. Help them. Hey, this is how we compare to X, Y, Z, you know, competitor and be honest as much as possible. We should always be honest, but be as upfront as possible, I should say, with where you're bad at and where they're great at, those types of things. But long story short, having something awareness, and then choosing a particular strategy and then depending on your strategy, you might ramp up how much you actually do with the actual intelligence program.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So we're basically, and we did it as a third party basically, which was, you know, I think one of them was. Analytics software.com, like stuff like that. So it wasn't like we were spoofing as our competitors. I think that crosses a little bit of a line. But basically, we would have this Intel, I would have, there's a whole program here. Like I would have basically, I'd have sources, these customers I knew were always going to stay because they liked the founder or something like that. I would get on the phone with them every quarter to just to be like, hey, like, what are you liking? Why haven't you switched yet? These types of things, or I'd see them at conferences.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A minimum, just knowing who they are, having a strategy. So for Profa Well, we never had comparison pages because we very quickly went from a challenger in this very competitor market to the leader in the market. So all of a sudden, we were going to be above the fray. That was the idea. That was the strategy that we had, which is we're going to have a lot of intel on what's going on with them, why people care about this product. We had white label NPS surveys and customer development surveys going to our competitors' customers. Like that's the level. And it was just automated. It wasn't like it was taking a lot of time, but we just wanted that intel.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these marketing channels are getting denser and denser, right? CAC and B2B is up about 110% over the past 10 years. Consumer, it's up 145%. If you're selling sales and marketing software, it's up 220% because there's just so much sales and marketing software doing sales and marketing things in the market. And so the other reason for this is we haven't had a brand new marketing channel since 2015. And that was Snapchat. We have TikTok, you know, TBD, depending on how you think about it. But we're going from like brand new marketing and advertising innovation every quarter to basically every five years. My point is if you are not in a blue ocean, you're not in the Peter Teal go to a market of one. You're not those types of things, which is most of us. And even some of us who think we're in those things were actually not, you do have to focus in your competitors on some level. And the levels I particularly think are a barrier.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's interesting from a startup or a business perspective is, I think, that don't focus on your competitors is terrible advice. It's amazing advice for product teams. When you have a competitive intelligence program or you have competitive intel, I try never to share that with product ever because products should just focus on the customer. They should not give two craps what's going on with competitor A or competitor B, right? But as an overall missive, don't focus on your competitor is a terrible advice. And if I'm being charitable, it's just outdated because some fun facts and I alluded to some of them before, over the past decade, if you're building in tech, particularly in like SaaS or subscriptions, you now have 16 times the number of competitors if you started a business today than if you did 10 years ago. And this is because everyone in their mother can spin up a website, a server, they can drive traffic to that site. So there's just a bunch of stuff in the market, right? And then because of all that stuff.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so my background, I started my career, I worked in U.S. intelligence, I worked for NSA, and I was just an entry-level Intel analyst basically. I was only there for just over a year. And what was kind of interesting is you get taught first principles thinking in so many different ways because you're solving essentially puzzles every day. Now, those puzzles are like finding a bad guy or a gal or finding this piece of information. Like those are all the puzzles, but you have to kind of think through how to figure this out. And a lot of those puzzles involve you have these number of entities. How are they going to react? And you're trying to predict how they're going to react. And you're also trying to help figure out how you're going to kind of react or act in the context of them, right? So like node analysis basically.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only 20% of you are going to do this. You know, when I give a talk on it. And so I'm not even going to talk deeply on it. Like you 20% come talk to me. I got a whole framework for you, that type of a thing because I think people just nod their heads and they tweeted and they just don't end up doing.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product person, typically it's the product person, but also in marketing. So I think it's just one of those things where you could get away with not doing it. Now, though, the way the market's going, like you're just starting to see this more and more, you're starting to see more tooling. The reason you're seeing more tooling is because they're starting to connect it to actually being useful rather than you having to set up your own kind of customer development program. I think the other reason typically people haven't had to do this is because there's a lot of brute forcing that's done in startup land. And it only lasts so long. So all of these companies that raise a bunch of money get the $100 million exit, everyone's clapping because it's a big number, but like Cap Table screwed, everything's bad. It's a win because it's a win. But all of those companies are ones who are able to brute force to a certain level. And they never learned how to actually understand their market or their customer. And I think that kind of story will continue.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing you can do put a number on a whiteboard. You're going to have 10 customer conversations a month. Just 10 non sales conversations. You're just going to talk to 10 people. Or you're going to send one survey and people are terrible at sending surveys. Surveys are actually great. You just have to be good at sending them. And good is, it's not a high bar. It just means that you have 30 to 45 seconds of someone's time unless you're compensating them. Don't send 45 question surveys by email where the first question is, what's your email? Like, you know, don't do that. But just put a number on the board. I think the reason we don't do it is because it was quote unquote easy to get away with not doing it. Like if you really think about a funded environment and some products are so paradigm shifting that like the biggest misconception about customer research is like I have to listen to them. You don't have to listen to them at all. You just have to understand where they are. And then you're filtering all of that with all this other data and then you're making a decision and you're earning your paycheck as well.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retention is better, all these things are better. And the thing that I think 20 years ago or 10 years ago, you didn't have to do customer development because, you know, and this is where the Keith Rip law is just like customer research is dumb or whatever his famous quote is, but you didn't have to do it because there just wasn't a lot of stuff out there and we all were riding the wave of the internet. But now the market's harder and harder. So like, what are you going to do? Are you just going to keep throwing stuff up against the wall? Or are you going to actually do the stuff that all of us talk about doing and actually do the research? And the research is hard. It's never going to be 100% accurate because you're going to have to use your judgment, but like that's your job. And so that's more of a rant, I guess, than a hot take. But I think it's, I also think this is one of those things that AI kind of starts solving, especially all this generative AI, because now you can just throw all that stuff into a workload and then all of a sudden you'll get back a lot of the sentiment or all that kind of stuff. So you don't even have to do your, do the hard part anymore. Yeah.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then only one out of ten companies actually do customer research or development on a quarterly basis. This should be a continuous thing. It should be a monthly, weekly type thing. Not saying you're like sending out surveys or having all these conversations on a weekly basis, but like only one out of 10 are doing quarterly. So that means the number that are doing monthly is even smaller than that. And I just think that's insane. And when we look at all data and we have a lot of data on this, and this is something where I've been talking about customer development for a long time, everything is better. Like everything is better. NPS is higher for organizations that have customer development functions or even just ICPs or buyer personas, depending on what framework you're using. Willingness to pay is typically higher. The funnel is more efficient. CAC is typically, LTV to CAC is normally much, much higher. All those growth numbers, you're typically growing at a much, much higher rate, like a 15-20%, like not a small delta, 15%, 15, 20% higher rate.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I have the 85 year old curmudgeonly man perspective on customer research. So here's the thing. Everything in your business, it does not matter what type of business you have. Everything is used to drive someone to a point of conversion or justify the product or the price that you're offering it. That customer is a human being. You're driving to that point of conversion. And it's your job to understand how they perceive you, how they perceive their problem, how they perceive the world, like around them, around your products. Like we all know this on a philosophical level, but here are some fun facts. So one, only one in five companies have buyer personas or ICPs. Only one in five. So we talk about this all the time. Retweet the articles, you know, we give the advice. So many of us give the advice. But then we look at our own companies. Only one in five have some sort of segmentation ICPs, right?”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Medium and small, like let's talk about a support ticket, right? Like this person's pissed off. They're coming in, they're pissed off. What are the causes? Well, there's a lot of different causes that we're probably like, oh, we didn't get back to them in time. And then we gave a crappy solution. We gave this. It just kind of allows us to kind of like look at the problem. And so it's more of a way of thinking on that level. And it's not happening, you know, we're not going to have an hour-long conversation about a support ticket, but the support folks that I've talked to about this, they go, okay, cool. Why is he upset? Well, we didn't get the answer in time. Okay, my first line is going to be, I understand we didn't get you an answer quick enough. Like, apologies for that. You know, it just allows them to have a little bit of like an extra second to kind of think through things and kind of move forward with it.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. So I'll say big, medium, and small things, and I'll try to be really quick. So, big things, it's like, what are we facing? Oh, we're going to try to charge for this metrics product. Now there's a bunch of competitors. The customers don't really care about it. So we have this problem, and the problem is growth, right? Like, how do we grow a product like this? How do we grow our company, right? And what's really interesting about like a big problem or a nebulous problem like that is you end up having a lot of conversations about the problem, which I think is more useful sometimes about like, well, what are we actually trying to do? Like, let's get alignment as much as possible. And then it's like, okay, well, what are the causes of our growth?”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's great for using for presentations. It's great for mission. It's great for all of these different things because it's a little bit more actionable than just the five whys, which is more of a way to have a conversation.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't just solve world hunger because it's kind of the symptom. It's this problem that exists. Well, then I want to break down what are all the causes of world hunger, right? And it's a little more brainstormy when you have these conversations with folks, especially, again, when they struggle with this. And all of a sudden, I can list out all the causes, irrigation crisis, aid not getting to where it needs to be, you know, famines, drought, et cetera. And then what I can do is I can rank those causes in terms of like magnitude, right? So if we're trying to solve world hunger and for some reason, we discovered irrigation was the biggest problem. Like if we solved irrigation, you know, everything would be great. Well, then I'm going to align my solutions to all of those different causes. And you get this like nice alignment between I can solve a cause. And if I solve the cause that's big enough and proper enough, I'm going to eventually solve the actual problem or mitigate the problem, I should say. So that's the framework that I found really, really useful. And it also”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, people always talk about it. And I have. There are no good courses that I have found on first principles thinking. There are good blog posts, but the good blog posts kind of explain what it is, and then that's kind of it. Like it's like, this is what it is, and here's an example, and most of them quote Elon Musk about rockets and breaking down the different parts. So what I kind of found is there's the five whys, which I think someone's talked before, or at least I've read it in the newsletter before, which is just you keep asking why, right? You know, you kind of, well, this is this way. Well, why is that? Well, this is this way. Why is that? I found the model that people who aren't great at first principle thinking or aren't great at talking about it, that kind of helps them unlock is this thing called problem cause solution. So I learned this in debate in college and high school. And it basically is you have a problem that you're trying to solve. Well, you can't actually solve a problem. So if we talk about world hunger,”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we didn't have product marketing or official product marketing. They had this conversation, and all of a sudden it's like, all right, Neil, you need to provide one thing a month. There's so much stuff we've built. A lot of it we haven't announced. You just need to provide one thing a month. Marketing will worry about how to like position it in a way that isn't too far, isn't overselling it, but also gets us something per month and you can approve that positioning. And then all of a sudden, it's like you start getting this tempo going, which obviously is the goal.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complete misalignment if you don't call it out on what good looks like. Just complete misalignment. Like so-and-so is going and building. They think one product launch per quarter or I'm sitting there and I'm like, well, we should have a medium one per month and we should have a big one per quarter, right? Complete misalignment. And if you don't have a way to talk about that, like some sort of nexus to have that conversation, you end up not having it. And then you end up creating this friction and resentment on both sides because everyone thinks again like Tim isn't doing well and it's like that's not what's happening. It's just the expectations aren't set. And then what was really cool is that you start to find out that the why they aren't hitting what good looks like is all solvable. And most of the time it's this team isn't talking to this team. Oh great. Well, marketing wants to do these launches. Product isn't providing them stuff. All right, let's get these two people together. Have this conversation.”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's really, really hard, but most of the time you just haven't set an expectation of what good looks like in terms of tempo. And then you haven't had that constant conversation to make sure that Tim has what he needs in order to ship”
2023-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source