Hi Florent,
Many thanks for your time and well-thought-out post.
We at Casafari are flattered and look forward to the 2nd interview.
Your favourite point is my favourite point - referrals aka “word-of-mouth” is by far the best performing source of traffic, better than any inbound marketing effort (still, inbound marketing has to be done for enough buzz and snowball effect).
My comments to your “As a Personal Hack Growth Challenge, I will try as hard as I can to:”:
1) Learn continuously from my colleagues and clients, both my failures and successes
- Iterative development based on soft failures is core to our philosophy — we follow the “Lean Startup” process: assumption -> failure -> assumption-> success. Each iteration is based on explicit and implicit feedback from the previous step.
- We foster collaboration and honest open culture where we together learn from failures. With personal mentorship in teams, embracing failures accelerates learning and pushes innovation.
- Each month, there is a 360-degree feedback “management <-> team members”.
2) Focus on specific areas of the market and not try to focus on everything at the same time, as I am sometimes prone to doing
- Mindfulness and focus are essential to achieve the top performance in any field.
3) Learn to calculate 27*27 and maybe even 28*28 …
- What about 29x29 deriving from 30x30? Please do not use multiplication, just “+” and “-” operations.
- Based on findings from the previous point, can you explain how do you come from 25x25 (=625) to 27x27? Please use only “+” and “-”.
- What is the most analytical project have you done so far? Let us discuss it during the call.
(We sell a data product + bizdev & sales on its own is a number-driven process)
6) Be proactive with problems and creative and reflective with solutions
- It is inevitable in a fast growing young company.
8) Evolve from a simple business developer to an intrepreneurial growth hacker
- We do not have any “simple business development” position. What about “growth hacker” and universal soldier surrounded by a AAA-team of hich-achievers from the day one?
10) Bring croissants and wine at my arrival
- Now i understand the overwhelmingly positive reaction of our team. I am in for it. :-)
P.S. I think “business developer” is the most exciting position at our company at the moment (together with Real Estate Data Analyst / Data Scientist). However, I think you should consider becoming a country manager which is a cross-functional position. It means you would enter the market, be the growth hacker in every sense of the definition and eventually close strategic deals. But it also means you would be challenged more than any business developer.
Therefore, questions to be answered:
- Are you a fast learner?
- What are your boundaries, what can and can’t you learn?
