This episode, Serial Entrepreneur and Startup Founder Gideon Rubin talks about how most startups get their first customers, the ways startups change as they grow, and the necessary skill sets for starting a company versus scaling a company.
Gideon Rubin is a Serial Entrepreneur and Startup Founder who focuses on building organizations that change people’s lives. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- How to evaluate the potential of a startup.
- How most startups get their first customers.
- The ways startups change as they grow.
- The keys to product-led growth.
- The challenges of leveraging initial user bases to build social credibility.
- Ways to discover important product features for the mass market.
- The skill sets required for starting a company versus scaling a company.
- Indicators that a company needs to restructure or find outside capital.
Resources:
Connecting with Gideon Rubin:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 1:32 – “At the end of the day it does come down to how do you get those first couple of customers it depends on the business and the type of business but almost always the first handful of customers are from direct outreach or direct relationships oftentimes that would drove me to start the business to begin with was someone telling me they had a pain or someone telling me about an opportunity and then me going back to those people and saying hey if we solved it this way would that be interesting to you?”
- 8:21 – “A lot of the things that the early customers want or are asking about is not necessarily applicable to the mass market so it’s either customization or a feature that is really important to them but maybe the mass market doesn’t need that or are unique to the business processes of that early customer so that’s where you have to have that second track thinking in terms of how does this apply across a broader audience we honestly use focus groups oftentimes.”
- 22:25 – “There’s this concept called vanity metrics, things like how many website visitors did I get? That may be interesting, may be valuable, maybe not valuable depending on your business because they might not be the right visitors.”
