Here’s the transcript

Falling in love with your own ideas. Don’t be too greedy. They buy into
themselves too much, putting too much time into them before you seek feedback. They don’t
know how to talk about the product.
You have a great product and you have a great team, and you don’t
know how to distill it. Lack of sort of deep synergy
between the product and the market. You developed the product, but you’re not developing the
brand narrative. Spending money on Facebook ads, Instagram ads.
It feels like you can target very well nowadays. But I would be careful
to make sure that the users that you’re acquiring are actually sticking on and
using your product is being very quality users down the road.
Don’t be too greedy. Absolutely. Okay. You can be aggressive.
You can go for it, but don’t be too greedy. I’m going to
get 100% of the market share. That’s totally BS.
What’s up, guys? This is the Venture Summit West in Silicon Valley,
California.
And the whole theme for this conference is where innovation meets
capital. So we got entrepreneurs and we got dreams. We have venture
capitalists and we have money. And these two things are coming together
to make dreams come true and to change our lives. So let’s go
check out the event. There’s a lot of great pitches. There’s a lot of great
investors to see what’s going on. She’s turned down by too many investors
or whatever, and you just give up.
I see that a lot. Not being focused on your customers,
your clients. Somebody says something and you follow up and do
a little better details like, hey, that just wasn’t true. A deal killer.
Don’t spend money, don’t extend too bad. Are you able to
manage client interactions in a way that provides you feedback to
improve your product? Nowadays, it’s very common
to find growth in places that are false positives and
are not really looking for as little
as $50,000 to raise. And I’ve seen as high as
$20 million. So there’s a lot of different people that are looking for a lot
of different types of capital, of partnerships. So one of my key
takeaways here at the conference is keep your slides simple.
I’ve seen some of the most complex slides. 20 startups in
a room with some investors. There’s investors sprinkled in the crowd, and then
these startups are just pitching. They have three minutes per pitch. I am all
about helping businesses communicate with video.
Combine the areas of discovery, sales and marketing
and screen sharing,
not aligning the capital needs of the business with
the reality of what the market can take. The key to growth is the tightest
possible feedback loop. You can try anything, you can try everything,
but you’ve got to get feedback on it as fast as possible. Be honest but
competent. Hire the best people you can. Okay?
And anything you can do to shorten the cycle between trying something and figuring out
if it helped you or hurt you, and then responding to that feedback to prune
the ideas that didn’t help you and drive more effort into the ideas that did
help you, that will leave you the tightest possible purchase. Viral. A lot of VCs
here, a lot of angel investors, a lot of entrepreneurs pitching, and there’s this man
that has a blue balloon. We want to understand why. So I did present today,
and there are a lot of presenters. Oftentimes you’re looking for a presenter that
you saw, but you can’t really find them. And so this is like a
homing beacon if you want to find me the guy.
What are some indicators that we can focus on as entrepreneurs?
Four week retention, 30 day retention,
engagement. If there’s kind of like the Holy grail of trying
to sell them something, try to start testing that early
on as opposed to later. You can throw a fortune acquiring customers who
try your product, bounce off of it and go away, and you’ve just set that
money on fire. The key is making sure that what you have is going to
work. The secret success is to be persistent in the long run.
I think great people who are highly committed working on a mission with
some passion can do just fantastic things. So you met someone that
you’re sort of a fan of? I am. Well, I met an investor
who is on this podcast called The Pitch. The Pitch
is a podcast by Gimlit Media. Basically, it’s kind of like shark tangy investors
on that podcast. And I didn’t know she was at this conference. She gave some
great insights. There’s very little discipline around the burn.
That’s one of the biggest issues. They are not spending their money on
the branding piece. I believe they’re wasting a lot
of their runway on stupid decisions
that are rushed into there should be a better process of decision making.
One piece of advice you can give entrepreneurs, and he says, don’t come to events
like this. I mean, I just got done sitting through the I just sat through
two rounds of the seed stage. There was 20 companies in each round. I got
three minutes. I couldn’t come close to enough information to
invest that he said you couldn’t waste a lot of money networking and going
to these conferences and just having your backpack and sitting down and watch people
speak. But should you really be heads down building your product?
Should you be out there selling? So, of course, you take that with a grain
of salt. But it’s true, there are a lot of places
to waste your money. And I think that if you can really focus on networking,
building your product and making your customers happy, I think that’s the best bet.
All right, that’s it. That’s it. We’re out here. There you go. It’s another conference,
another day, another conference. Another day, another conference.