I've been an entrepreneur a long time — this is the best thing I've ever done.
Right up front: I have NO vested interest here. I just want every startup to have access to this approach.
Last July, I came across a course on Maven called "Build your Startup Growth Machine," run by Matt Lerner and Nopadon Wongpakdee. I checked them out, signed up for their emails, watched a bunch of their videos.
Their company was called SYSTM. Their website said they helped "impatient founders and their teams" (um, have you met me?) to "find your big growth levers and pull them" (YES PLEASE).
When Sunil Unka started as Chief Sales & Marketing Officer in Jan, we decided to join the 10-week SYSTM program.
We did customer interviews with people who had bought from us but hadn't yet experienced the product. We asked them, "What will our product enable you to do? Why is that important to you? When did you first start thinking about this? How were you addressing this need before then? What else did you consider? Where were you / who were you with when you pulled the trigger?"
Our aim was to deeply understand the kind of journey that led people to us, so that we could stand in their path and "look like food."
We created our Customer Psych Playbook and Messaging House: the documents that map those customer insights and lay out the kinds of messages that speak directly to our customers' core needs.
We developed our growth map: the journey people take once they enter our ecosystem, from following us on social to visiting our website to signing up for emails to purchasing the product. We found our "rate-limiting step": the part of the map that was the biggest constraint on results.
We created our experiment backlog and implemented our growth meetings. What are we testing? What is our hypothesis? How will we know if we're right?
The program was a LOT. Six of us participated fully; we regularly shared what we were learning with the rest of the team. Each week, we had pre-watch videos, a 90-min core call, and a 60-min call with our coach (the amazing Beth Carter, love her so much). We often had calls with Matt and Nops. We held weekly 3-hour team meetings to discuss and unpack — and of course we had to implement everything we were learning.
We agreed this was ***not*** professional development — it was our JOB. It was core business activity, and essential to our successful future.
When we signed up, I was aiming for two outcomes. The first was to scale 10x, 50x, 100x. That one's going to take a while . But the second was a robust, systematic approach to achieving that scale — and we got it.
For so long, I've felt like I was sort of stumbling along making half-decent guesses, some of which sorta worked. But now I have a PROCESS: a clear approach, with measurable results, that anyone else can participate in.
We've become a learning organisation.
SYSTM's next cohort started in May. Any questions, sing out; I'm obviously a superfan and happy to chat.
Ngā mihi maioha / warm regards,
Kaila
