Congratulations - you’ve secured a round of seed funding or your Series A and you’re celebrating the fact that not only have you come up with an idea that solves a problem for a group of people, but you’ve discovered how to tie to a core human need that makes them become loyal to your product and company through the process of insight development.
What’s next? You’ve got the money you need to make your dream company a reality, but as a founder one of the most critical things to realise in order to grow a business is that hiring the right people to execute your vision is the key to success. When you build a team that understands the insights from which your startup was founded, you have the opportunity to scale.
Why Founders Get Stuck Trying to Grow a Business
One of the most common hurdles that founders encounter just after raising their first investment round is figuring out how to let go of all the hats they’ve been wearing and build a team they trust to execute their vision.
Most great startups have founders who served as head of product or sales; oftentimes they were both. That’s because successful startups are almost always founded by people who have heaps of experience in that particular industry and have figured out how to solve a significant problem. The challenge comes when you start to hire outside people to be the dedicated head of product and head of sales so that you can focus on being the CEO, lead the company vision and build a culture.
This is critical for growing a business: you need to be able to step out of the front lines to focus on scale and growth.
As a successful angel investor, I have seen many startups get out there and raise an early round but then are unable to get the business up and running. It’s because the founders aren’t able to work out how to remove themselves from the equation and pass the baton on to a trustworthy team who fully understands the company vision.
Using Insight Development to Scale a Business
I’ve talked a lot about using insight development to go beyond solving a functional problem for your target audience and tie your value prop to a core human need. However, the concept of insight development isn’t just for proving out your concept - it’s a powerful tool for growing a business and scaling a startup for hyper growth and success.
Before you secure funding, the process of insight development involves identifying personas and their true desired outcomes, linking those desired outcomes to a core human need and evaluating potential solutions those personas would explore to reach those outcomes.
Now that you’ve secured funding, you’ll want to build insight development as a core muscle of your company. The process is the same as pre-funding, except now you’ll include your product as a potential solution for your target audiences. Is your product delivering the desired outcome to that particular persona? If not, why not? Where does your product fall short?
By continually using insight development throughout the lifecycle of your company, you’ll:
Get to product-market fit faster
As you scale, bring your team up to speed faster
Improve the efficiency of your product development, sales and marketing
Building Teams for Success
As a founder, you instinctively know how to sell or build your particular product because you have lots of experience dealing with it first-hand. But when you hire somebody to lead your product or sales teams, you have to get them up to speed. What happens a lot of the time is you find people who have the technical skills, but they aren’t able to break down the problem for new employees, causing you to continually jump back in and step back from your leadership role.
The way that you bring someone on board and replace yourself in one of those key roles is by breaking down the problem with the insight development framework.
Once you have your basic principles established, the folks you hire will be able to glean insights from the core insight development structure and culture you’ve instilled within your startup without relying on your in-depth knowledge and expertise. They’ll be able to get inside the personas’ heads, understand their true desired outcomes and drivers and be able to convey this to your heads of sales, product, growth and marketing.
This will help you not only build a product that gets to product-market fit faster, but continue to grow faster and out-innovate the competition.
This technique may even be the skill that helps you convince somebody to buy your company one day. Thankfully it worked for me. I just wish I could find a new Spreets to do every year ;-)