Open Source Rapid Research About Market Acceleration & GrowthX
PageKicker: push a button, build a book.
Contents:
- What are GrowthX and Market Acceleration?
- Fit with PageKicker
- Exercising the PageKicker Product
- Next Steps
What are GrowthX and Market Acceleration?
As a fund-raising startup founder in the Midwest I was interested to see a recent article by Quora pal and fellow “book guy” George Anders about GrowthX, a venture capital fund with a focus on “Middle America.” Their focus on business-to-business startups with early revenue matches my plans as does their geographic preference. My interest piqued, I read further.
As I paged through the website, I discovered that GrowthX offers a program called “Market Acceleration” that is a rigorous system for generating revenue that is “profitable, predictable, and scalable.” Since that is precisely what PageKicker needs most at this point, I investigated further and quickly found an outstanding article by co-founder Sean Sheppard on Finding Product/Market Fit.
Sheppard set the stage by providing an assessment of seed stage entrepreneurship in spring 2016 that matches what I’m observing in the marketplace and from potential investors.
The traction milestones that must be hit to proceed from stage to stage are becoming more rigorous — which means (to sum it up … ) “product-centric founders beware.”
Many founders lack the knowledge and experience to efficiently and effectively bring a product to market.
What’s the solution?
a data-informed and market-validated awareness of the predictability, profitability and scalability of revenue …
GrowthX claims to have a “proven method of learning, testing, measuring and validating” revenue opportunity.
We call this process Market Development and it unfolds in two parts comprised of six distinct phases:
Market Foundation
— Resource Review (Preparation)
— Market Discovery
— Market Messaging
Market Execution
— Instrumentation (Preparation)
— Market Outreach
— Market Results
Sheppard’s first blog post provides a plan for the first item (“resource review”) with a manageable series of clearly defined tasks and milestones. Future posts will do the same for the remaining items. Once I saw the task breakdown and that it made sense, I was sold. I said to myself “I want to work with these guys.”
Fit with PageKicker
I have done a pretty good job as a visionary CEO and self-taught CTO, but I know that I need to add more skills to the mix to get the company over the hump. This market acceleration method looks like a good fit for me. I have a decidedly Teutonic streak. I can march through a checklist and get it done. I am also opportunistic: give me an needle-thin opening and I can coax a camel through it. And after decades of experience with product development and publishing projects, I know that I can manage a pipeline.
As a classic product-centric founder and effective networker, I saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by applying PageKicker’s rapid research capabilities to the problem of learning more about GrowthX and “market acceleration. A thematic book build is always a good way for me to exercise the system and identify opportunities for improvement, and it’s turned out to be something of a “nuclear bomb” for getting the attention of decision makers.
Exercising the PageKicker System
As we turn to PageKicker, it’s time for the elevator pitch.
Push a button, build a book.
PageKicker accepts explicit or implicit user specifications, searches permissioned content, fetches it, analyzes, designs, assembles, converts, and distributes the results in ebook, web, document, or mobile format. It can do build unique new books in a matter of seconds at a cost of pennies on any topic and in any quantity.
How does this work exactly? Well, the source code for the command line interface is open source, so anyone can download the code (git clone https://github.com/fredzannarbor/pagekicker-community.git) and use it against any permissioned content on a local or cloud-based system. There’s also a web-based demo site using sample content at PageKicker.com, which is what I used to create my first “book”, or in this case, research report. I decided to start with background information about the founders and their portfolio companies. This is a test case of a broader market hypothesis: individuals will find value in rapidly assembled research reports, and companies will find value in being able to do the same thing quickly, inexpensively, and at scale. From my days at LexisNexis with its Company Dossier product, I know this is true given licensed premium content at high prices; what I don’t know is whether there is an opportunity in the market at this lower price point and on a different product performance trajectory.
I proceeded to the demo workbench and entered search terms corresponding to the portfolio companies and founders. I did this manually using information from Crunchbase but it could just as easily have been done programmatically in a batch job for an enterprise customer).
You’ll note that as I entered the “seed phrases” on the left I added the term “(company)” to help the proof of concept system disambiguate. My expectations for the results here are not super high since these are mostly new companies and I am only searching a narrowed slice of public permissioned data. But the fun part is that now I push a button, and 30 seconds later, I get back a test build of a PageKicker book.
Sometimes the system does quite well, other times not so well. As I suspected, this was one of the “not so well” times. Not really a big surprise; we’ve been bootstrapping to get to this point and to continue effectively through seed stage we need to add a machine learning PhD or two and a couple of marketing demons.
Because PageKicker is a learning organization, I logged these quality issues to the open source project’s tracking system. Many enhancements in search are needed.
The system didn’t find anything on the portfolio companies, which again is not overly surprising as the demo site is searching only public data and the companies are young. It would have done much better if it crawled their websites. Heading the right direction for product/market fit but not nearly there yet. So I added an enhancement request to that effect.
Next I decided to run Sean Sheppard’s P/MF article through PageKicker’s behind-the-scenes Document Analysis Tools, which generated a suite of results including a word cloud, an image montage, a list of proper nouns, a programmatic summary, a readability report, and a deep research brief.
The most significant sentences of the article as identified by the PageKicker summarizer are provided below. There are some blemishes, for example the dropped letters and the treatment of URIs and bulleted lists, so those also have been added to the issues list. But on the whole it’s not a bad summary — could save the reader some time.
* The risk now lies in capital e cient market development, not product development.
* Datainformed awareness of predictability and scalability of revenue is more important than volume (https://twitter.com/share?text=Data informed+awareness+of+predictability+and+scalab ility+of+revenue+is+more+important+than+volume &url=http://www.saleshacker.com/foolproof formulafindingproductmarketfit/) +OF+REVENUE+IS+MORE+IMPORTANT+THAN+VOLUME&URL=HTTP://WWW.SALESHACKER.COM/FOOLPROOF If you follow a proven method of learning, testing, measuring and validating, you’ll be able to decide whether you should iterate or scale.
* We call this process Market Development and it unfolds in two parts comprised of six distinct phases: Market Foundation Resource Review (Preparation) Market Discovery Market Messaging Market Execution Instrumentation (Preparation) Market Outreach Market Results I’m going to reveal more of the formula in the coming months but I want to hit on the rst two phases in this post.
* Step One: Resource Review Mapping and Planning What To Do: Review the current market development team and skill sets.
* Understand and de ne customer acquisition channels, pricing strategy, and data acquisition in preparation for Market Outreach (http://www.saleshacker.com/introducing-co-outreach-sales-hack/) later in this process.
PageKicker also generated a readability report. One takeaway is that Sean’s smarter than Donald.
Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.57
Flesh Reading Ease Score: 38.25
Sentences: 52
Words: 972
Average Syllables per Word: 1.77
Average Words per Sentence: 18.69
A list of proper nouns and keywords was extracted using the Alchemy API and priority ranked. The results are pretty good considering that the first two items are the author and one of his cofounders. (My name makes it in because I had commented on the article, which is a correct behavior).
Sean Sheppard
Andrew Goldner
Neal — Poya
Brett B
Fred Z
Trish Bertuzzi
Silicon Valley
San Francisco
CA
Ann Arbor
Market Outreach
Market Foundation
Market Development
market development
product development
Series A
Pipeline Review
Marketing & Sales Technology Stack
Age of Applied Technology
marketing and sales
Series A.
productdevelopment
partner
ICP
Breakout Sales
2 months
21 days
22 days
Finally, the system generated a research report using the keyword terms. This strictly programmatic approach has only mixed results. Note on the page below that it gets some useful info about market development (center) but we can see in the paragraphs above that the system got confused by “Brett B” and went off to gather random stuff about Brett-the-distinguished-English-family.
I know from experience with four hundred alpha testers that these results can be dramatically improved by human editing and that potential customers want that capability. I also know from experience that this single test case is only scratching the surface of the system — it is inherently scalable over much larger document collections and much more challenging problems.
That said, this demo reflects what I already know to be true, that the platform has a lot of promise, but has not yet achieved product/market fit.
Next Steps
The first few steps in the Market Accleration process as laid out by Sheppard are pretty self-explanatory.
Phase One — Resources Review
Step One: Resource Review Mapping and Planning
What To Do: Review the current market development team and skill sets.
Outcome: Determine preliminary recommendations to maximize sales throughput and effectiveness.
Step Two: Marketing & Sales Process Analysis
What To Do: Review the current marketing and sales processes.
Outcome: Determine preliminary recommendations to optimize by removing any blockers,friction points or bottlenecks that can be eliminated through simple process change.
Step Three: Current Marketing & Sales Technology Stack
What To Do: Review the systems, tools and rules in place today to effectively manage the market outreach programs.
Outcome: Determine preliminary recommendations as to whether they should be maintained or replaced.
By glancing at this task list I can see what some of the recommendations will be: get smarter, get more systematic, get more focused, and get more resources. By skipping ahead to a few of the items in Phase Two such as “develop ideal customer profile” and “fill funnel” I can see what some of the key action items are going to be. I can also see some “eat your own dog food” applications for PageKicker. For example, I know that PageKicker can do a good job creating a research guide to Marketing & Sales Technology stacks, and I can imagine that being able to do that rapidly, at scale, at a cost of pennies, customized for each individual reader, and always updated at reading time, could be a valuable service for many digital marketing companies.
Bottom line?
- I like the GrowthX methodology and I want to learn more about it.
- I learned a lot from doing this exercise about myself, about my company, and about where it needs to go next.
- The article on Product/Marketing Fit the impetus for this piece is a must read.
Cheers,
FredZ
PS — to try out PageKicker, go to http://www.PageKicker.com; the build your book form is at http://www.PageKicker.com/index.php/workbench. The Document Analysis Tools are in private beta but if you want to try them out just send me an email at fred at pagekicker doht com with a test document attached.
