"If you learn something from every failure, you can take a win from something that initially seems like a loss."
It's ok to fail. Nealesh Patel Patel shared that he has more failures than successes.
But that hasn't held him back.
Why? Because he learns from those failures.
And what he's learned from failures has led to massive opportunities and growth, such as the story he shares in this clip about responding to customer feedback at Crunchbase.
Because of what he learned from what seemed like cutting criticisms, Crunchbase is now improving their product in a more intelligent, intentional manner.
Learn more from Neal Patel on The GTM Podcast.
#productmanagement#customerfeedback#innovation#success#failure
Was texting with the company I'm advising they're having a little bit of a rough patch. And I was like, hey, look, I've failed way more than I've succeeded, honestly, Like I have more failures than successes. But it's because, like, if you learn something from every failure, you can take a win from something that initially seems like a loss. And the win that we took during this process that initially seemed like a loss was like, I was one of those people that was like, ohh, yeah, feature parody. Like, ohh, we're missing this. We're missing this is your first reaction is I'm so proud of the product we have, right. And so when they're doing this. Feature comparison, it comes across as a criticism of your product, right? You're like, ohh, human nature is like wait, wait, wait what like no, no, no, no, don't sell my product and then it quickly it'd be like, OK, well we'll fix that An example of that was like people would say so that's great crunch base like you guys understand private companies, therefore you understand private markets, your private market intelligence, but like you only have like 4 million companies and there are hundreds of millions of companies out there. Why don't you get more companies? Because I have XY and Z, the other provider that. Cosmetic companies, and this is where some of those tough conversations came through. And my initial mistake was I turned some and I was like, dude, we have to get more companies. Going back to your point earlier about chat, CBT and generative AI and like how much cheaper it's gotten, we actually can create new company profiles very efficiently with great unit economics, but it still costs something. The light bulb that went off was like, OK, let's suppose I can actually create more companies. I can go from 4 million to 40 million. If you want customers eat, what impact would that have? Well, you then you'd have the same number of companies or more. Than this other competitor and there then when I do a side by side comparison on my approval deck, you look just as good or better. OK, awesome. So that solves maybe your CFO's problem from a deal approval optics perspective. But like, does that actually solve the business problem you're trying to solve or do you care about Joe's shoe store on the corner or do you care about finding the next perplexity? Who do you want to sell your wares to? And then I would say like, if you want me to get more companies, we totally can. I have the ability, we validated it with the product team, but what we're doing now is using our resources wisely. So when customers are partners. Tell us they want more companies. We asked them which ones and then we go get them. And so we are increasing the size of the database, but we're doing it in a more intelligent, intentional manner that every new company we have we know is adding value to at least one customer.
