Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - How to Build and Scale Product-Based Startups Without Wasting Resources | Darren Lee - Product Marketing Strategist

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Lessons - How to Build and Scale Product-Based Startups Without Wasting Resources | Darren Lee - Product Marketing Strategist · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, discover how to stand out in a crowded market by embracing authenticity
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  over flashy, imitative tactics. Learn why choosing a unique customer-centered approach builds
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  lasting trust, and understand how assembling a high-performing team fueled by shared values
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  drives long-term success.
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  The thing that's concerned that entrepreneurs have when they put something out and then they see
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  their competitors being flashy and promising the world, and when you play in a space you know
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  who's real and you know who's full of shit quite quickly, but you get frustrated because you lose
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  customers. So I kind of want you to give entrepreneurs maybe some very simple or tactical tips
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  when you are launching a great product. Do you know what's a great product? And you feel like
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  you're being outmatched on the sales and marketing front by somebody of the shitier product,
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  but they know how to really say the right things or just show up in a way that maybe a product
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  focus person doesn't understand how to show up. How do you compete? You don't devolve to these
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  shitty sort of gotchas, sales and marketing tactics that we're sort of talking about that creates
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  a shitty customer experience where customers are buying, they have remorse, they want to refund,
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  they're not getting it. You know that that's the average customer that goes through your
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  competitors' funnels dealing with. So what do you do? I think if you know how the game is played
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  over here, you should be zigging when everyone else is hiking. You've never met a few times. I've seen
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  your content. What does that mean? So if everyone is like running the same level funnels, same level
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  landing pages, the same level offers and you're familiar with that, it's good just to completely
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  avoid it and do something completely new. So if they're running this specific landing page,
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  don't have a landing page. If they're doing loads of sales calls, have no sales calls, have a different
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  approach to it, right? There's different ways we can slice and dice it so that you are not
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  becoming into that crowd. The biggest problem with this I find is that a lot of guys are trying
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  to sit in, they're running HSC, they're running consulting, they're running coaching, they're running
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  SMA. But it's like a shitty copy of the other person. It's a rendition, yeah. That's where people
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  try always imitate others online, whereas the category of one will actually just have his own
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  principle and process to this. So let me just show you how I walked through this process.
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  So when we built the agency in the beginning, there was a very common way to build agencies,
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  but I didn't go through those programs. I didn't go through that process at all. I just
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  intuitively worked off. These customers have a specific problem. I can get to them this way,
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  true outbound, true outreach. Outreach doesn't really work. Maybe I could do something different,
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  maybe I could send them Loom videos, maybe I could show up their door, maybe I could do something
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  unique. I was basically utilizing my own intuition as to how to solve the same problem. Now we still have
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  a good product. We still have a good way to do it, but you don't need to follow everyone else's
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  as a voice. Give a give a not example. I was early on writing on LinkedIn from 2020, 2021. I was,
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  I would honestly say, one of the first people in the entrepreneur community to be ready on LinkedIn.
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  It was from Justin Welsh to where I learned from. He was like first, and I remember quick hands
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  that by the way, I quickly learned that like, okay, this is really sparking. When everyone said
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  that was a bad idea, when everyone said it was cringey and it was walk and he should be on Twitter
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  and on Instagram, I was still writing on LinkedIn. I still have a small audience,
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  but I have a very engaged audience that people like to trust me. They see a lot of social
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  proof and they come inbound. Most people that want to work with us come from that. It's a unique
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  mechanism. I have a unique way of doing the same thing as everyone else. So developing that
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  in a kind of unique identifier is completely unique, right? Give a not example. When everyone's
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  running ads, we're running, we're recording podcasts, right? Some guys have just ads businesses.
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  We're doing something that's unscalable. I've had mentors tell me in the past that, you know,
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  maybe you're recording too much podcasts, but the intangible benefits of what we're doing today
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  is you can't measure it, right? It's a unique way to do it. But at the same time,
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  we're putting in the seven areas of trust that people can develop with us to work with us.
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  They see that there's a unique way to work with us in the front end and the back end then
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  to have that unique mechanism as well. I think it's down to the team, right? I've been very
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  focused on building a winning team and excellent team, a team of people that get it,
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  like it and trust it. And I think my one mechanism for building a team is that people
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  must want it. They must get it and they have the capacity to do it. So this is from traction,
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  ideally. The idea of an attraction is that you want people who are truly about it. So the
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  guys that work that I've been hiring, you know, not everyone works out for sure. But ideally,
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  they love podcasting. They're about it. They really truly love it that they're willing to
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  upload the podcast at two o'clock in the morning. Take the client call at five o'clock in the
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  morning, make the adjustments that majority of people won't do. And that's what becomes a
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  category of one, right? And it's also having a unique experience. And I'll keep going back at
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  this point. But how we've been doing this in the beginning is that customers will actually stay
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  with you. Even if you don't get that greater results, if your experience is high, we have
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  example, we work with some companies and certain niches that are a little bit drier, okay? It could
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  be real estate, multi-family, HR, hero. Are they sexy industries? No, no, they're not. But we create
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  an experience for clients that put that makes them feel special. We do reporting. We do a lot of
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  nice reporting, elegant reporting. We do a lot of coaching, a lot of personalization. We make them
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  feel which they are special to us and they help us and we help them. And I think that's a unique
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  experience that most people, the scalar bros will tell you not to do is not scalable. My friend,
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  I literally will travel across the world to a workshop with someone who's not even a client
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  who's just a prospect because I love it. I'm about it. And I'm willing to show them in person.
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  I've literally sat in office rooms for hours for free because I'm willing to do the unscalable
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  stuff that builds scale into your business. You know, I think that's actually a really smart idea
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  because doing this stuff that doesn't scale is the actually, in my opinion, the only competitive
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  advantage that you have against somebody that's a $100 million dollar public trade company.
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  Have you heard about Brian Chesky on that? I know, I know Brian Chesky, but I don't know his thoughts
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  on. I know that the scalable are doing the unscalable. That's a Paul Graham.
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  So so Paul Chesky has like this thing about he's a specific word for it, but it's about
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  being in the detail. So he would be in the UX UI meetings about some random button on the
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  customer success page and he would be there changing the color of the buttons for a two and a half
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  errors that entire team. And like this is the reason why Airbnb is a size that is he's like
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  obsessed with the tiny details. And I think we go back to, you know, what truly
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  creates like a unique product, unique business is being in that detail.
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  Right. That obsessed. Exactly. But being in the detail though, right? Because
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  Eric Sue talks about this personality test you can do. He's got you personality or something
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  personality you and he will give you a good idea of like where you were, what type of leader you
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  were, what type of entrepreneur you were. But if you have a low attention of detail,
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  this doesn't mean you just leave it. It means that you actively work on those things.
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  I give an example. For myself, as like a leader in our company, I actually have a low level of
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  empathy, but I've recognized it and I've been working on it. I work on my relationship.
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  I've hired guys who have high empathy, low logic, so that these guys bring in a much better
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  culture. Now you need to have that awareness of yourself. Now we're not a nine figure business
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  but we're a seven figure business and we're doing well as a service seven figure business.
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  At the same time, it's not just me and it's not just sales that will get to the next level.
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  It cracks, it breaks, there's so many issues. That I think we all can spend more time looking at
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  to try and improve. Right. We can all start taking much more inward look at ourselves, at our
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  company, at our clients and think, am I building the right ship or am I building something that's
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  completely non enlightenment, but who I am and who I want to be? I think that's, and I think that,
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  I mean, like you, in one more point, just to reiterate how important it is,
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  surrounding yourself with people that also champion that vision and that, in those ideals,
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  I think is actually incredibly important. Because then you start to create this sort of this
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  board of advisors or this group within your company that forces you to act in the right way
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  and to be the right kind of entrepreneur. Those guys are about a war with you. Yeah.
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  So you also, you don't want to let them down. That's a thing. So as a solo printer, it's very
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  easy to make shitty decisions. But all of a sudden, when you have to justify it,
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  these incredible A players that you've hired that are like, you know, high value, high moral,
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  high ethics, high focus on customer, all these types of, these personality traits and makes for
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  a good person. When you do have the opportunity to make that shitty decision,
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  you're not going to make it anymore because you surrounded yourself with all these incredible
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  people, which I think is just like a safety mechanism to make sure that all your decisions
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  are aligned towards the right target. I love that man. I think as well that a lot of guys,
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  you know, they, they have their idea with their business, they have the product that they have,
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  but they don't really think about these small nuances, but this is what builds culture, right?
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  When you're a company, the people that you have, these are people that you'll go to war with
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  effectively and even some of our team members are quite young. But what if you can't,
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  if you're in early stages and you can't afford huge A players, you can find guys that you can
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  develop and give them so much of your own experiences. And I think a lot of people have worked,
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  what else? They like it because I'll give them one, the one attention will have calls and so on
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  to four and I'll teach them about where they want to go to and put them on a career trajectory.
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  So I think there's different ways to slice and lose it. As a leader, you want to hire higher
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  people that are great, whether you can afford it or not, and then offer them your own consulting
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  and advisory. But then at the same time, if you're young and you're trying to get into space,
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  I think there's nothing wrong with being an employee, right? If you want to partner with someone
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  and work with someone, so be it. There is a lot of merit to doing that, especially smaller companies.
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  I give an example that we have a lot of young guys who will become great entrepreneurs,
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  but in the early stages, they love learning how all the parts of our business work together.
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  And now that we've developed into more products, more services, they're excited about it.
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  They get up and they're going to want to go for it. We are now doing much more things and
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  they are doing much more things. So there's much more advantages than just showing up and getting
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  a job done. Well, I actually think the best people to hire, I've thought about this a lot.
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  The best people to hire are people that would be entrepreneurs in any other circumstance.
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  For whatever reason right now, it's not in their stars, it's not the risk profile, whatever it is,
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  but they could be that entrepreneur. It's just this is not the time for them to do that.
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  So for whatever reason, that's an opportunity for somebody who is taking the risk, build their own
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  company is an entrepreneur. So find a way to find those people and then also to your point,
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  you have to know where they want to go so that they don't just flake on you like in two,
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  three years because if they want to go do the wrong thing, that's fine. But you should be aligned
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  and moving towards that target together. I like that. My last point I'll say on this is,
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  you know, sometimes people don't know where they want to go, but you also want to enable them.
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  So if you've ever read leaders eat last, talk about circular safety. So I've got 180 with this,
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  who my own kind of leadership style, which was before I thought it was about getting
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  worked on and working hard and all this stuff. Now it's about putting people in their best seat
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  and allowing them to almost develop their own career with you. So I'll give an example. My CEO,
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  who was recently promoted, young guy came from Goldman Sachs, knew his stuff, really knew
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  everything. And for him, he wants to, he didn't really know where he wanted to go. So I wanted to
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  help him see that he wanted to have a better career with us. So it's about creating that space,
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  allowing him to do his best work and allowing him to develop as an individual to read. And maybe in
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  a couple of years time, he'll want to go build something and that will be great versus this short
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  term mindset that unfortunately a lot of our businesses are best off. Thanks for tuning in.
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  If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.
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  And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description
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  to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.