Jason Evanish

Are you a founder or CEO prepping for fundraising? Or a GTM pro who works for one? You’ll want to check out our new interactive fundraising deck and executive summary templates. While AssetMule was designed to help GTM teams better engage prospects with interactive sales assets, we’ve started to see an influx of founders signing up to build their fundraising assets. And it makes total sense. Just like buyers, investors are overwhelmed with the amount of pitches coming their way and are harder to reach than ever before. Founders need new ways to rise above the noise and earn their attention. And that’s exactly what AssetMule is designed to do. Not only will these templates help you pull your core fundraising assets together in a fraction of the time and with less effort, but they’ll help you engage investors in a more meaningful way and book more pitch meetings. Check out the demo below and sign up for AssetMule to get started for free.

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Product Market Fit, a new framework. I've been working on this for a little while now and figured it's time to "eat my own dogfood" and test it out in the market. In this framework I provide a visual outline of the journey from "day zero" to PMF. Along the way founders must iterate on their product as well as their market to close the Product Market Gap in order to get to PMF. More details in the article. Let me know what you think 🙏 https://lnkd.in/gyF8V--x

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SAAS NORTH Conference is less than one week away. Do you have your ticket yet? I’m excited to be speaking on the panel, “Totally Fubar! 3 Epic Founder Fails,” moderated by Kenneth Pham. I’ll be joined by Ewan Reid and Kelsey Hahn to discuss the challenges we’ve faced as founders. Entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster, and we’re sharing valuable lessons learned along the way. If you're a SaaS founder scaling quickly in Canada, I hope to see you and your team in Ottawa from November 13–14. Get your SaaS pass now—and use code MIKEPSN24 for 25% off your ticket: https://lnkd.in/gtm7eY8E #entrepreneurship #founders #leadership #scaling #startupstory

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I love data. Especially people data. It helps answer those lingering..."is it just me...or?" late night questions. The OpenView SaaS Benchmark Survey is one of those annual ones I always read and reference with the founders I work with. That's why I'm so excited that High Alpha is partnering with OpenView, Paddle and Kyle Poyar to launch the 2024 annual SaaS Benchmark Survey. And guess what -- it's live! If you want early-access to the report, be sure to participate and we'll be back in November to share insights. Link to survey below. https://lnkd.in/ey9FAgYV #SaaSBenchmarks

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Talked to Authority Magazine about how I've built lasting customer relationships while scaling Forethought. If I could summarize it, it all boils down to delivering great work and forming real human connections. Customers who have a great experience with you or your product will come back again and again — especially if you they know the people behind the product. Loved this interview because we went way back to how I got my start in CX and AI, and how that has shaped our value of "customer-obsession" at Forethought. Please give this a read and lemme know what resonates with you! #CX #Customers #Entrepreneurship #AI #CustomerSupport

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Storytailor would love your vote and support! If you haven’t already done so, please follow the link in the story below and show your support!🌕🧑🏾‍🚀🚀📖

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We use Circle for our community at Exit Five, and Matthew Carnevale has become a Circle power user (he runs our community). They did this awesome write about how to grow a community with insights from Matt and Exit Five sprinkled in. • How to use your community as an audience growth multiplier • 5 systematic community growth strategies • Why you should treat your community like a product, and • Best practices for growing your community https://lnkd.in/e9vs32NQ

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Friends, next Wednesday i'll be sharing some tangible ways to leverage a designer's mindset while building a startup or doing your job. Though design has come under some heavy scrutiny the last few years for being perceived as "too abstract" or "too far away from the business," I remain bullish on design's ability to fuel innovation. I'll be sharing practical examples of how we leveraged a designer's mindset at VMHA to: 1️⃣ Prototype our market positioning 2️⃣ Create a culture to foster the free flow of ideas 3️⃣ Establish our managerial controls and business processes 🚨 Spoiler Alert 🚨 The designer's mindset allowed us to listen to our customer and learn quickly through prototyping and iterating! I'm always excited to share space with ambitious veterans and their supporters and am looking forward to the discussion! #designersmindset #prototype #iterate #learn #listen #adapt #culture #innovation https://lnkd.in/g6-UFnn7

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Ideal world - company strategy —> product strategy —> GTM strategy. Everything is in lock step. Value capture is 🔥 Real world - company strategy sort of informs product strategy. Product strategy changes a lot based on loudest voice. GTM strategy changes each quarter to make the number. 👆🏽is a fact of life. Strategies change, directions change. But stories persist. Employees, markets, investors, customers and partners remember stories long after strategies disappear. This is where PMMs shine. The best PMMs relentlessly hone and refine their company story, product story and value story. They have the superpower of being able to stitch these narratives from seemingly disparate strategies. Why were we founded? Who do we serve? Why are we here? Why should customers care? Where are we going? Why does this matter? Why is this different? Your story is your strategy.

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🚀 Venture debt covenants might sound like a small part of the deal, but they carry huge implications for your startup’s future. 📈 You need to be strategic in your negotiations to avoid any pitfalls down the road. It’s all about setting yourself up for success, not stress. Dive into more details in the original Kruze Consulting post. The link is in the 1st comment. 👇

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Big news: Announcing the Lenny & Friends Summit ✨ I’ve heard from so many of you that you’re pining for a large yet intimate IRL gathering, and now feels like the right time. I’m excited to announce that I’m hosting a one-day in-person summit for senior product leaders, this fall in San Francisco: https://lennyssummit.com/ I’m confident you’ll walk away a better product leader. We’ll have tactical talks from world-class product builders, organized roundtables with peers, a curated group of attendees, and a few fun surprises. Current lineup of speakers: Shreyas Doshi, Ami Vora, Nikita Bier, Scott Belsky, Eunice Kim, Mihika Kapoor, Yuhki Yamashita, Julie Zhuo, Claire Vo, Shishir Mehrotra, Nikhyl Singhal, John Cutler, Eric Metelka, and more speakers to be announced. This summit is for senior product and growth leaders, and typically someone’s title will be: - Product Lead or Growth Lead - Principal PM - Group PM - Director of Product or Director of Growth - Head of Product or Head of Growth - VP of Product or VP of Growth - Chief Product Officer Given we’re expecting lots of interest and the venue has limited capacity, we’re asking people to apply to attend. Paid newsletter subscribers will get priority access. Apply to attend now: https://lennyssummit.com/ I’m quite excited to make this a reality, and I hope to see you there.

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Three pivotal moments in my career made me realize I am capable of more than I ever imagined. • Landing my dream job when I needed it the most, thank you to the team and community at Crunchyroll, circa 2017-2021. • Building a recruiting and operations team from scratch, showing up to C-Suite meetings with my "professional" self feeling tiny in a room full of giants. Thank you to the team at Commure + HUMAN CAPITAL. And... The last of the three... Meeting AJ Thomas ⚡️ during an interview loop at X, the moonshot factory, circa 2021, where she genuinely made me feel like I was one of the best in the industry. Our conversation about people operations, recruiting, candidate experience, and, most importantly, building the solution to transform all of it was one of the best interviewing experiences in my entire career. I wasn't an Ivy League grad, worked for FAANG (MAANGA?), or scaled a crypto startup to 100s of headcount. But in that moment, I felt like I belonged amongst the best of them. And today, I believe I am. For those on the journey unsure of which path to take, if you're good enough, or whether or not your startup will survive, I urge you to find time on Intro and book a mentorship session with AJ Thomas ⚡️ Who knows, maybe you'll leave the conversation more capable than you've ever imagined.

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A lot of pre-product, pre revenue startup clients approach Calibrate to architect, design, and develop their first web or mobile app. One common theme we see among many of these ambitious co-founders is trying to launch with a larger feature set based on what they THINK their users will find valuable. In scenarios such as this, our team always advises our clients to consider pairing back the feature set to an MVP (minimum viable product). We start this process by asking our clients “what are the critical features absolutely necessary to launch your product and start getting valuable feedback from the user base?”. Anything beyond that is speculation and unnecessary. In the startup world (or even with software SMBs are launching), it’s imperative to get to market as quickly and cost effectively as possible to start establishing a POC (proof of concept) and collecting feedback; MVPs ensure that happens. Through collecting real user feedback, clients can prioritize and execute on their roadmap (aka new features) with FACTS (aka data driven insights) v. CONJECTURE (aka speculating on what users want). Check out the blog article on our site for some tips to help narrow down the feature set of a product to an MVP: https://lnkd.in/gHTeynVb

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For a long time, I had very naive ideas about prioritization. Here's what I've learned over the years. 1. Unless you are a tiny startup, your company is designed to do multiple high-priority things at once. The argument, "Well, if everything is high priority, nothing is high priority," almost never works (while rational). The 🐘 in the room is that the mix of high-priority things has changed, and the org design is no longer fit for purpose. What seems rational to you—oh, obviously that team is overwhelmed and we need to set priorities—is, behind the scenes, "Crap, we got the budget wrong for that group. Anyone want to contribute? No? Hmmm. Surely they are inefficient and can juggle more than one thing, right?" See below. 2. Most senior execs know that the plans will change. They know that by March, there will be a new set of priorities. So they focus on budgets, not priorities. So when you see lackluster strategies and vague priorities, remember that there is a whole other prioritization activity that centers around the allocation of money, how people get bonuses, very back-of-the-napkin revenue attribution models, etc. 3. Humans, in general, are not great at building a mental model for capacity. Capacity in software is hard. People aren't fungible. The architecture is what it is. You can't have huge teams. You are building the factory (to meet the needs of a strategy) AND the factory is building "the product." Oh, it isn't a factory: it is more like gardening. This is important because our mental models for what we are prioritizing (e.g., focus, capacity, typing, bandwidth, etc.) are often all over the place. 4. Most companies are not progressive when it comes to thoughtful re-orgs, org redesign, reallocating capacity, etc. The simple thinking is: "If we stop doing X, then we should let those people go because they fit in this cell on the spreadsheet." People too heavily couple the finance spreadsheets with one-row-per-person, and the (most often useless and made-up) % allocations to things. This means that basic things like having priorities and reducing work in progress are fraught with very justified fears around layoffs. To some, a pristine list of force-ranked priorities looks like heaven. FINALLY, we can make decisions. To others, it is NOT GOOD. This is why efforts to visualize WIP often turn into Game of Thrones. There's a silver lining with all this! If you are aware of these tendencies, you can figure out approaches to prioritization that can nudge the org in the right direction. Knowing that the theoretically pristine force-ranked list of efforts is likely not possible, you can devise other strategies like building more realistic models with finance and being more open to "everything in high priority" yet focusing on the actual conflicts/trade-off decisions, etc. And embrace products like Runway and DoubleLoop that engage people in tangible discussions about how $s flow into outcomes and then back into your core models.

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Awesome seeing Ryan Bettencourt, CoFounder of Growth Collective (acquired by Toptal this summer) in person this week! Nothing makes me happier than seeing former Human Cloud clients truly crush it. In Ryan's case, his company Legion Works acquired Growth Collective in 2021 and turned to Human Cloud to help navigate where they should invest their time and resources, and build a comprehensive strategy that differentiated their brand, business model, and tech, while aligning with industry best practices. While Ryan is an expert in everything marketing, having started, scaled, and sold multiple growth and digital marketing related companies and teams (also a Babson College grad so entrepreneurship runs in his veins cc Amir Reza, Ph.D. Keith Rollag Sebastian Fixson Wendy Marcinkus Murphy), he was new to our boring and not so tech sexy world of B2B freelance talent platforms. Which, in 2022 and early 2023, our industry looked more like B2C and SaaS than what it's always been - a relationship based professional service industry mixed with tech, staffing, and the contingent talent ecosystem. Obviously Ryan and team created something special. But most important, Ryan is proof of freelance as a viable industry for both entrepreneurs and executives to make their mark through either (1) scaling freelance adoption across their company or (2) building new platforms, solutions, and applications that make a better working world a reality. cc Jon Younger PhD

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Huge News...today, Contractor Commerce launched AI within the platform. That's right. We've been working behind the scenes for months to harness the power of AI to help contractors get EVEN MORE value from their online stores. Today we rolled out the first of several major AI enhancements with 5 awesome customers who wanted to pioneer this new layer of technology alongside us. Ecommerce for contractors is already working - turning website visitors into $$. But we're never satisfied. We wake up every day, listen to our customers, and invest in our platform to help contractors make more money and build thriving companies. We won't stop until every contractor has an online store....now powered by AI. If you want to learn more or supercharge your company website with AI-powered ecommerce, message me. https://lnkd.in/g2YzpAuc #AI #HVAC #ecommerce #contractors

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One of the most unintuitive things to do as a founder or product manager is to go talk about pricing with customers. It's also incredibly valuable to be good at. 📅 Join team Schematic on October 3rd at 11 AM EST for a free webinar on how to master willingness to pay conversations with your customers & prospects. Whether you're a SaaS founder, product manager, or growth leader, this session is designed to give you an edge in pricing and packaging — essential tools for driving growth. ✅ A pricing framework that puts you ahead of 90% of founders ✅ Actionable templates and questions to guide customer discovery on pricing ✅ Practical tools to confidently determine your market’s willingness to pay Link to book your spot in the comments.

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As an early-stage Chief of Staff, I often talk to folks who are looking for CoS roles. I get asked a lot of similar questions and want to share my answers for anyone who's pursuing this path: 1️⃣ What does a CoS actually do? CoS's are all different. At a company as young as Aomni, Chief of Staff is a "white space" generalist role, meaning I take on any business priorities that our founder/future execs don't own themselves. Today that means Ops, Sales (in partnership w CEO), Marketing, Customer Support and certain Product tasks. 2️⃣ How can I find CoS opportunities at startups? I don't think it's a good use of time to apply cold. This is because CoS hiring at startups is highly trust-based and the market is crazy rn. Unless you have a sterling resume, you're going to lose out to competitors in the CEO's network already. Instead, leverage your network to develop relationships. Look for opportunities to start on a freelance basis where you can build trust before the job is even posted. Consider different roles at the right company where you can evolve into a CoS over time. 3️⃣ How can I stand out to hiring managers? Same thing as #2 -- it's all about relationships. Demonstrate that you can perform well in the role and add value as a trusted partner to the CEO/exec team, whatever that takes. 4️⃣ What's the hardest part of the CoS role? The biggest thing is stress. You don't have the same level of responsibility as the CEO, of course, but the pressure they experience reaches you via osmosis. I'm always trying to improve how I manage stress. 5️⃣ Do I need to have consulting or banking experience, or an MBA? Absolutely not. My somewhat irrational and biased opinion is that these experiences are actually anti-signals about one's fit for the job at a startup (probably not the same at a big company). Many people with these backgrounds are uncomfortable without structure, inflexible and unwilling to do grunt work. Effective CoS's at startups are highly curious learners, resourceful operators and great first-principles thinkers. As long as you can demonstrate these traits you're golden. --- I also want to shout out some communities that anyone in this space should have on their radar: Ask a Chief of Staff, Chief of Staff Network and Generalist World are 3 of my faves. Always happy to answer questions and support new and aspiring CoS's in any way I can!

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