Shashanka Rao

Adam and Santosh at RB2B have focused on sharing progress in terms of real numbers and *learnings* whereas most other founders are focused on sharing pictures from events and dinners and some product feature screencasts. i don't get it. i get it that not everyone can have a hockey stick happening from early on but if you are building correctly you will always have insights and learnings - those will be far more valuable to share and connect with your users than hawking product updates. content is the easiest way to cut through the noise and yet almost everyone does it the wrong way. think about what you write and if it will make anyone pause and read. if not, delete the post.

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Converting PoCs to Contracts - A Lesson in Difficult Conversations Like going from dating to co-habitating, moving your first customer from pilot to contract is a Big Leap moment for early stage startups. Waiting too long to have the conversation is the most common mistake. You are afraid of rejection, so you never learn if your product is making life easier for your customer, let alone how much they will pay. The truth is, once your pilot is launched, you can't be too early in discussing what it will take to move to a contract. I just got off the phone with a startup CEO who told of countless meetings, waiving integration fees, hiring a dedicated employee and more all to get their first customer live. After several revised timelines and a reorg, the engagement was going sideways until he said "We can't do this for free anymore. We need to move to contract or we are done here." At first, the customer balked. But once they assessed the situation and realized how crucial the software was, they changed their mind. The startup is now on track to sign their first big deal. That wouldn't have happened without a difficult conversation. Early stage startups are fragile. Moving from pilot to contract is the first real test of so many things - your product value, your customer success, and the real competition. Unless you test your relationship by taking the leap, you'll never figure out if you've got something real.

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"Just to be real, B2B SaaS is pretty boring, pretty painstakingly boring." Preview of the up-coming podcast we did with Varun Anand, co-founder at Clay, one of the fastest growing B2B SaaS companies in the world rn. Not being boring is clearly working for them. --- This is one of my fav episodes we've recorded for the Operators Only podcast so far. We talked to Varun about his journey from working in politics to tech startups to joining Clay ~4 years in as a co-founder. Clay has some of the most insane word of mouth and PMF that I've ever seen. But it didn't happen overnight. It took Clay ~7 years to hit the breakout success they're having today. And Varun joined half way through that journey when a lot of folks on the early team were leaving. Varun's a very open, low B.S., and focused operator too. That really came out both in asking people he's worked with for questions to ask, and in the conversation itself. Lot of high conviction takes on building startups, finding PMF, life, careers, etc. Dropping the full interview on Sunday. --- P.S. 👉 I'm still trying to figure out the thumbnail / episode title. If you're down to give me ideas / feedback, I'll DM you the episode for an early listen.

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Optimizing growth: the “leaky bucket” isn’t an early-stage retention problem Product managers and data analysts tend to focus on optimizing the user onboarding funnel, or FTUE, more than other segments of the user lifecycle. As tempting as it is for a product team to focus a disproportionate amount of its energy on optimizing the onboarding funnel, ignoring the elder period of the user timeline is a mistake. In reality, user churn is more expensive later-stage than during the onboarding process: a user who has been in a product for a year is, by definition, more engaged than one who just joined. Losing the user with a year of tenure is more damaging to the business than losing the early-stage user because of that proven affinity and acquired behavioral data.

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Vinod Khosla is considered as one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists ever. He's an indian-american billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures, with investments like Square, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart and more. Mario Gabriele's Lessons from Vinod: 1. You may be closer to a yes than you think. 2. Get the goose, not the golden egg. 3. Expect resistance to innovative ideas 4. Do not forget: your job is to sell. Top resources from Khosla: 1. 1. Pitch the way VCs think: https://lnkd.in/dVQ95uc5 2. How to solve the Pitch Problem: https://lnkd.in/dFKdTABy 3. Plausible tomorrows 2035-2049: https://lnkd.in/dGQdtA4b 4. Letters to a Young Founder: Vinod Khosla: https://lnkd.in/dX22Hxx7 Ilustration by Eleanor Taylor -- Subscribe to my newsletter for more content about Startups & Venture Capital: https://lnkd.in/dczX2bya

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Vinod Khosla is considered as one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists ever. He's an indian-american billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures, with investments like Square, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart and more. Mario Gabriele's Lessons from Vinod: 1. You may be closer to a yes than you think. 2. Get the goose, not the golden egg. 3. Expect resistance to innovative ideas 4. Do not forget: your job is to sell. Top resources from Khosla: 1. Pitch the way VCs think: https://lnkd.in/dVQ95uc5 2. How to solve the Pitch Problem: https://lnkd.in/dFKdTABy 3. Plausible tomorrows 2035-2049: https://lnkd.in/dGQdtA4b 4. Letters to a Young Founder: Vinod Khosla: https://lnkd.in/dX22Hxx7 Ilustration by Eleanor Taylor -- Subscribe to my newsletter for more content about Startups & Venture Capital: https://lnkd.in/dczX2bya

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From my father at the machine to searching disruptive frontline startups. We (@ Delin Ventures) are excited about the blue-collar / deskless space. But: Most SaaS companies in the space are "just" building "good-old" SaaS solutions like they were built 5-10 years ago for the white-collar space and tailoring them to frontline use cases. We would love to see more disruptive solutions, leveraging technology they could not have leveraged 5-10 years ago – yes, like AI, beyond just using OpenAI for translations. Where are the truly disruptive frontline solutions? Tag them in the comments or reach out if you're working on something exciting in the area – or want to build a startup that makes frontline workers more efficient. PS: The guy in the picture is my deceased father who was enabled to immigrate to Germany thanks to a blue-collar job at a manufacturing company ("MAN"). Without that opportunity at the frontline, I wouldn't be here writing this today – thus I'm also emotionally invested in the area.

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