One of Many Paths to a Successful B2B Startup

This article details the process I used to enable a successful launch of a B2B startup along with my business partners. I am intentionally writing it for the folks who are also a little weary of the meme-form advice that’s painted across LinkedIn every other hour for the last seven years. I do not believe the concepts are difficult, I believe everything except the dime-store advice is difficult. Don’t get me wrong, love me some Steve Jobs, but the next person who tells me why to hire smart people is getting ban-hammered from the internet.

For context, I sit squarely in the middle of the visionaries and the technical team as Head of Product. I do nothing except guide everything I can control and advise on everything I cannot control. It’s a gigantic, amorphous and thankless job and I am deeply, madly, in love with it.

So in the brevity of one article, what is one approach to successfully launching the core product offering in a B2B startup? I’m going to start in an unlikely spot, I’m going to start with you.

Set your identity aside

You’re going to need to set your identity aside for the better part of 12–24 months and not gauge your self-worth on your money or your latest success. This is really important. Of course money doesn’t define you as a person. Of course you have the depth of personality to go a ‘few months’ without a win without that impacting your opinion of yourself. Of course. Just, you know, brace yourself for some jarringly honest conversions with yourself at 2 am. Telling someone that you’ve started a company that’s currently ‘pre-revenue’ feels perfectly great within the first three months. Having that same conversation on month 11 feels different.

Care more about solving the problem than you do about building the thing

If your idea for a product reduces waste, then the thought of someone being wasteful should cause you pain. You should reject the idea of waste entirely and want nothing more than a world that operates with the efficiency of a beehive. Your core energy towards taking nothingness and making it a something requires that you are passionate about solving a problem. I’ll caution you right here only to ask you to take a full moment of reflection and ask yourself if you’re truly passionate about solving this problem or if you’re passionate about the version of yourself that drives a Ferrari and buys homes for your parents. If you want to enter this space for the reward, you’ll likely quietly digress a few months in, realizing that a 9–5 job is a gift from the heavens. This. Takes. Grit. All of it.

Did you take a moment to think about it or are you already picturing 1,000,000 users fawning over your perfect UI for the product you already know you want to build? Consider yourself warned.

Speak to people who lose nothing by being honest with you about the idea

I’m no measure of what a typical human being should be, but I do enjoy speaking to friends and acquaintances in settings where time has been allocated for full conversations. I’m more amiable in these settings and open to new ideas. This is where many people might decide to float their product concept. Don’t do that. Talk to people who are busy and squeezing you in. Talk to friends of friends in high places. Ideally people who could potentially sign off on the money required to purchase your idea. Travel to where they are, bring them coffee or snacks, and steal 15 minutes of their time. Keep it casual and listen to every single word of feedback. Listen hard. Take what that person says and filter it through another person. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Research the market you’re entering

What do products that solve similar problems to yours sell for? How much of that is software licensing compared to services? What’s the typical ramp up and training time? If your product requires a behavior change on the part of the user, who would implement that change within your customers organization? What can you do on your side to make that transition easier for them?

If you’re truly inventing a new space, good luck with that, but I spent the early days of my research looking for sames and similars. When competition comes a’knocking are they going to go for the feet and sweep you out on pricing? Are they going for your head to come up with a more concise solution? Are they going after your heart because your brand is loose? Do not attempt to solve all of these problems yourself. Like your product and your company, you’ll evolve solutions to those problems with the help of the good people you surround yourself with.

MVP means nothing

It’s literally meaningless. Minimum Viable Product is an amazing concept, an important one too, that has all but lost it’s way in today's tech culture. My tech team came up with the brilliant term “My Version of the Product.” In almost every conversation I’ve had with people over the last decade in product work, people sneak the word MVP into a conversation to make it sound like their opinion is weighted scientifically. It’s not. There are companies that understand MVP, and there’s a 99.9999% chance (scientifically speaking) that you have not interacted with one of them.

Instead of pretending you have a true MVP designed, think of what you’re doing as though you are going on a road trip where you have to draw the map yourself. The first thing you release into a test market is going to be the thing that tells you if you’re headed in the right direction. That’s it. Lean agile, progress before process, yes, yes, yes, love it, but think about the blank map and how far you’re willing to travel on a road before you see something that feels correct to the assumptions you sketched out on paper. In B2B your buyer isn’t always your user. The testing is a little hairy.

Do your thing

You have two immense gifts. The first is your willpower to solve this problem. It’s important to you, therefore it is important, and you can solve it. That’s a very cool and unique gift. Second, you’re alive in 2019. Your potential to impact the world today is effortless compared to having this brilliant idea 25 years ago. I drew up a short outline of things I had to do to get started and then I got started. Then I woke up every day for about six months and I got focused on finishing what I started. That’s how I did it, you’ll find your way to do it your way.

Here’s a boilerplate of what I ended up doing.

1. Validate the problem you want to solve in ways that are probably going to be uncomfortable for you
2. Pare down your concept for the initial release so that it can be what tells you if you’re on the right track
3. If you can, find well-reputed technology experts to aid you with your build
4. Test your product UI on non-technical people and instruct as little as possible
5. Research in bulk, solve incrementally
6. Read
7. Join at least a couple of product groups
8. Become a mentor to someone less experienced and an apprentice to someone more experienced. You’ll want to know what it’s like to be a mentor while asking someone to spend the time to be yours
9. Enjoy every minute. It’s an amazing trip. You’ll learn more in the first six months than you learned in your collegiate and professional life combined.

I hope this is helpful for you. I truly love product work, all of it, so if you want to spitball with me on anything you’re currently mulling over shoot me an email at bretmcdermitt@gmail.com. Be happy to co-learn with you.

I have to plug my tech team here, the folks at https://induro.io/ are the unicorns of the technology-build. Their standards for your product are likely going to be higher than your own. They absolutely crush extremely high quality code and they use their years of experience to do it in a time frame that makes the cost a no-brainer for what you get. Use them for your next project or do the nearly impossible work of finding an outsourced, onshore, team that’s remotely in the same ballpark. Do it. I gain nothing financially for making this recommendation.