🏍benyamin ‎’s Post

Saw this post about coming into a new company. Here are my two sense (cents?!) Build public channel slack ⚒️ automations for:  ✍️ New contract/quote signed ** 💵 New payments made (if you have a small sales team, otherwise make sub channels for each specific team)** ⭐️ new customer review ✅ form submissions (any inbound leads) 🆘 new customer support tickets Making these public and reading through them daily will get you quickly up to speed on: 👥 what the customers are thinking (reviews)🌊 what the inbound pipeline looks like (new form submissions) 📦 What is working, what you can repackage, what ICP looks like (New contract/quote signed) 💴 see where you can add services/see if you should raise prices (payments made)   **Dont build a channel for pipeline stages as it is just noise at that point. Highlight the most important stages (contract signed, payment made, etc in my case) and make those their own channels. 

The start-up Monday: You wake up feeling ready to dominate the week... Then the bugs in your code base, underperforming sales quotas, and high churn rates show up. 💻 Bug: “I’ll be an easy fix.” 👨💻 Me: Spends 6 hours trying to figure out why a semicolon broke the entire codebase. If Mondays had a boss battle, this would be it. But hey, its a new week, that means new opportunities in the forms of successes and failures. So here's to coffee, code, and another week in the ring! ☕💻 As my old coach used to : Focus on W-I-N, Whats Important Now. 🏆 #StartupLife #MondayMadness #BugFixWrestling

Hey, Hey, Hey 👋 Still Refreshing Facebook for the 100th Time Today ⁉ Look, we get it. Adulting is hard. Especially when there are life-changing events happening and you're, well, not attending!! 😕 Just sayin', our exclusive lunch 🥗 at the coolest SaaS startup in town (that's us, obviously) is only 12 days away. 😨 You could be here, mingling with our brilliant (read: slightly sleep-deprived but passionate) team, devouring gourmet (read: not cafeteria mystery meat) food, and unlocking the secrets of the startup universe. OR, you could, you know, keep scrolling through those cat videos. 😾 The choice is yours, but space is limited. Don't say we didn't warn you. 😉 If you want to avoid a serious case of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out on Free Food and Genius). P.S. We hear rumors there might be swag involved. Just sayin'. 😎 So fill the form below.👇 #logisticsautomation #Saassales #indianstartup

While Founder Mode was getting buzz, I found myself going back to this PG classic. It’s a personal favorite I shared with my team this week (and here’s why it matters): Do Things That Don’t Scale. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor. It’s a MUST-READ. (what can I say, Paul is the real G) The TLDR is— You’ve got to get close to your customers, and sometimes that means doing things that aren’t scalable. It reminded me of something I’m doing right now at Hampton that is far from scalable (but ridiculously valuable). Here’s what I’m doing: Before a member's renewal, they get an automated Slack from me. Nothing fancy—basically, “Hope you’ve had a great year. Here are the two or three big things we’re pumped about for next year.. Let me know how things are going or what I can do to help.” What’s incredible is how many people hit me back. Like 60-70%. And it’s not just a “hey, thanks!”— most of them turn into real conversations. I get to hear about their experience, what they love, what they want more of, and where we can improve. These conversations are GOLD. Is this scalable? Heck no. It takes me at least 2-3 hours a week. And could easily be outsourced. But here’s the thing—it gives me insights I’d never get from a report. I learn what our best members truly value and what they can live without. It helps me shape the future of the business in a way that nothing else can. In the early days of a startup, you have to get close to your customers. Real close. It’s messy, it’s unscalable, but it’s where the real magic happens. If you’re in the early years of building something— don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves and do things that don’t scale.

One of the biggest mistakes I see startups make: each team ruthlessly optimizes their part of the funnel, but lose all their gains at the handoff points between teams. Here’s how avoid this ⤵️ 🔻 A Full-Funnel approach: Creating a seamless handoff from the revenue team to outcomes team 🔻 Steven Sinofsky famously stated something along the lines of “Don’t ship the org chart.” A startup’s org chart is often chopped into marketing + pre-sales vs. post-sales + product experience. And because those two teams are separated in most org charts, that hand-off point is often one of the most-overlooked. So if you want to grow revenue and profitability fast, that handoff (the very beginning of onboarding) is one of the highest-leverage moments to optimize. And first impressions matter: a study from Zendesk found that once the initial NPS score is set during onboarding, future scores remain anchored there for years to come.  Onboarding story time: Once I was working with a PM who had been tasked with redesigning the payment journey for an SMB SaaS product ($20K ACV). Her goal was to get the user to sign a contract and put in a credit card. That sounds pretty important. And her change would no doubt make it easier. But what she was missing was that once a decision maker has negotiated a $20,000 contract, a clunky checkout flow isn’t going to dissuade them. However, just down-funnel of this checkout flow was an onboarding journey where we were losing 20% of our customers between that payment confirmation screen and the second week of usage. I pushed the PM to loop-in the the onboarding and success teams, and broaden her goal to reducing that 20% churn number. Together, we rewrote the confirmation screen so that rather than just confirming payment, it actively pushed the customer forward into onboarding materials, the customer success team, and the Slack community. Essentially: push the customer toward the product’s a-ha moment. #TheGrowthCMO #FractionalCMO #GrowthMindset #GrowthHacking #StartupStrategy #StrategicInsight #LeadershipLessons

I’ve contacted 1000+ stakeholders at top startups globally, and here’s what I’ve learned: Over the past few months, I’ve explored several avenues—designing, programming, and diving into new skills— it's just what I enjoy instead of being shackled to a single task. But what I’ve learned the most from has been outreach. Noting them down here: 1/Build relationships: The best conversations are rooted in trust. Focus on connection first, outcomes later. 2/Simple is everything: This might be personal, but I’ve noticed I get far more positive replies when I skip the clickbait and stick to straightforward, to-the-point conversations. You need to have enough faith in your product to let its value shine—without sounding like a snake oil salesman. 3/A “no” today isn’t forever : Timing is critical. Some of the best results came after months of follow-up. Stay persistent, but respectful. 4/Personalization works wonders : I understand this might not be feasible for everyone as this is particularly time-consuming, but think long-term and you'll realise that it saves you a lot of time by driving higher conversions, atleast for us! Let's hope I can refine this list further in the coming months!

We call ourselves Slack for construction. Not because it’s a cool moniker. But because Powerplay cracked the CAC puzzle just like Slack.   Slack famously drove bottoms-up adoption from its end-users (read: developers), persuading their companies to buy the product. Similarly, Powerplay targeted construction project managers and site engineers — the real users. Our product not only helped them keep records, but also generated detailed progress reports — automatically. That’s how business owners and decision-makers came to know about us. They were curious — and interested. The biggest conversion obstacle B2B SaaS can face is in delivering proof that the customer’s team will use it. And we proved that before we reached out. The sales cycle got dramatically shorter. CAC came down drastically. Not just that — word of mouth spread among site engineers and project managers, pushing down CAC even further. This is the power of unique insight, when combined with first principles thinking. #CAC #SaaS #startups #marketing #sales 

🥂 One thing that keeps us going at CloudForecast is celebrating the small wins and practicing gratitude. It's super easy to get bogged down in the daily challenges and setbacks of building and operating a startup. It often feels like you're pushing a boulder up a hill and making no progress. Through our experience at Perfect Audience and now at CloudForecast, I've found that success is built upon a series of small wins (with many setbacks in between) that may lead to a big win. It's important to recognize and remember those small wins. These can include pushing out a new feature, solving a complex technical challenge, or even a personal win! We have a #hurray channel in Slack where our team can post any wins, small or large, for ourselves or each other. The channel goes back about three years, so it's fun to see how far we've come when I scroll through it. How do you celebrate small wins or practice gratitude with your company or team?

As a startup founder, time is my most precious resource. With inbound messages and sign-ups constantly flooding in, I found myself struggling to quickly understand who I was talking to or which company was reaching out. So I created a simple but powerful hack using the Apollo API and Zapier to solve this problem. Here's how it works: 1. I set up a Zapier integration between Slack and the Apollo API 2. When I receive an inbound message or sign-up, I just input the email into a dedicated Slack channel 3. Within seconds, Apollo pulls key information about the person and company, delivering it right back in Slack This little hack has saved me countless hours each week that I would have spent researching contacts or preparing for conversations. Now I can quickly get context on who I'm talking to and focus on what matters - building relationships and growing the business. #StartupLife #ProductivityHacks #FounderTips

WARNING: Reading this post might cause your audience to become addicted to you: Most founders I talk to wonder 3 things about their customers: 1. How to attract them? 2. How to activate them? 3. How to charge them for access? But what if I told you it's just 20% of your customer's potential? The true change happens when they: 1. Start using your product 2. Fall in love with its quality 3. Have a dead-simple way to tell their friends about it That's how you build a billion-dollar brand with a $0 marketing budget. And it's not an exaggeration. This is literally how Slack became one of the fastest-growing startups ever. I'm breaking down the genius of their marketing strategy in today's video. Link in the first comment 👇