Episode 772 | A Highly Effective Framework for SaaS Positioning
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Thanks for joining me for this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and in this episode, I'm joined by Anthony Pieri. He's the co-founder of Fletch, which is a company that's been around for a long time.

which is an agency focused on B2B SaaS positioning. And Fletch has helped over 400 startups discover their ideal product positioning. Anthony and his co-founder joined us in New Orleans just a couple weeks ago at MicroConf, and he did a talk about positioning, about their really detailed positioning

I call it a framework, he calls it a methodology for defining and describing your positioning as a B2B SaaS founder. I love the conversation we had today because I got to start off by having Anthony define positioning in his words because if you know anything about positioning, it's that everyone seems to define it just a little bit differently.

And then we dive in to their methodology. It's a great conversation. And before we dive into that, at TinySeed, we are raising our third fund, TinySeed Fund 3. I mentioned it on the show here before. If you want to index across 100s,

hundreds of early stage B2B SaaS companies. In my opinion, TinySeed is the best place to do that. You can head to tinyseed.com slash invest to find out more. And if you are an accredited investor or equivalent and you want to put a little money in a place that is not the public stock markets and it's not invested in crypto, but it's in an asset that we've seen do quite well over the past 5 to 10 to 15 years,

And with that, let's dive into our conversation with Anthony. Anthony Pieri, welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us.

Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here. Great to see you again after your awesome talk in New Orleans. One of the highest rated talks of the last several Microcomps. How does that make you feel? Is this the moment where you're like, you know, I've done all these things in my life. I'm part of an amazing band on Spotify. I have a family. All the achievements. One of the highest rated talks at Microconf. You're cashing it in. I mean, this is a great moment for sure. It's so funny too because we live in the LinkedIn sphere of things.

and it does feel like the bootstrapper world is a different group of people who we don't always run into, but philosophically, me and my co-founder align so much more with the micro-conf way of thinking, and the books you've written are exactly what we tell people to do, right? And so it was very much like me and my co-founder, we'd meet these different founders who are incredibly niche and specific in what they do, solving real problems, and

And we're like, we found our people. This is amazing, right? And so I actually, it's funny, I came in awareness, you know, awareness of MicroConf way later than I would have liked. I would have loved to have known that this existed five, 10 years ago. And so I was like blown away. This is amazing. This is what we always preach to everyone. There's a whole community. They already exist. And so, yeah, it was really cool though. Really great experience.

You guys fit right in. I remember seeing you talk to founders and I was like, oh yeah, these are your people, man. I love that you just kind of made it, not even an analogy, but a categorization of who's on LinkedIn, like which SaaS is on LinkedIn and which SaaS is on Twitter, right before we hit record. And I'm not sure that I had thought of it this way, but you want to tell folks what you told me?

Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of the companies that will work with us will be venture backed. And so that's one criteria that puts you in LinkedIn land because you want to do that post and you want to show everyone else in your professional network. Look, we just raised $30 million and, you know, Twitter, you know,

people are doing fundraising announcements on Twitter too, right? But that's one aspect. And then a lot of times it's people selling to marketing teams or sales teams, making technology, MarTech, sales tech. And they tend, it seems like, to gravitate to LinkedIn because that's where most of their buyers are. So we get the companies that have a lot of thought leadership cachet and are talking about what they're doing for that specific group. So I would say most of the companies you work with are in those two buckets.

We rarely get design related companies, like developer tools related companies. We'll get some, but it feels like that group of people, they don't really sell to people who are living on LinkedIn all day. So for them, a lot of them have grown their audiences or have, you know, sales pipeline coming from people on Twitter. And so it does feel like we work with kind of

potentially the less creative and kind of more boring side of the house over with LinkedIn. So I'm like, should we start, you know, an X account and start getting followers there? But you had just said, you know, maybe the platform is dying. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's this is the debate. We actually have a $1,000 bet between Tracy Osborne and Anar Volset. You didn't meet Anar because he was sick this year, but you met Tracy.

And they bet on this podcast $1,000 that NR says Blue Sky will not be successful in three years from the date, and Tracy said it will. And we defined that, I think it was at 100 million registered users because when we made the bet,

when they made the bet, it was $25 or $30 million. And so that's a push for Blue Sky. A&R thinks it's going to stay with X. From what I'm seeing, just the engagement is not. It's just all over the place. And Blue Sky's maybe threads, probably not. It doesn't, it feels like engagement bait. So it really is up in the air right now. And my hope is that we go to a post-social media world because I...

I think social media has been a net negative in general. But all that said, let's get to you. Let's get to your bona fides. So FletchPMM.com if folks want to see the agency that you run with your friend and co-founder Rob. And your H1 is Let's Fix Your Confusing Positioning. Fletch has helped over 400 startups discover their ideal product positioning and bring it to life on a newly crafted homepage. And listeners of this show know that

It's very, very rare, if at all, that a consultant comes on this show because we get authors and consultants who want to come on because they want to sell the stuff. The reason you're here is because you brought it at MicroConf. Producer Sonia found you somehow, and then you and I did a call to say, hey, you guys do positioning. A lot of people do positioning.

Tell me what you have, you know, the MicroConf audience, because I'm really particular about who gets on stage there, just like I'm really particular about who gets on the show. You know, I said, tell me what you have. And you said, well, I have this framework or methodology, I think, as you refer to it. And it blew me away. I was...

blown away not only by the methodologies, it's the simplicity and the specificity. It's like, do this and frame it this way. And I was like, I love, this is such a good microconf talk, right? And then you showed up and blew it away. And as I said, it was one of the best talks in the last few years. So with that intro, so positioning...

What is it? Why is it important? Like, how do you think about it? And then we'll dive into your methodology, you know, as much as we can on an audio podcast. Yeah, for sure. So I think what one insight from the beginning when we got into this was we realized how unspecific a lot of these phrases are and a lot of them are used interchangeably. And so I would say one of the first things that Robert, my co-founder and I would spend multiple hours per day for months on end,

was trying to carve out the definitions of these different words so that they were mutually exclusive. And we started with like product marketing messaging that you would see in like a positioning mad lib, where it would be like, we help blank customer with, you know, blank problem. And we do this by blank feature, which leads to blank benefit. And so even just those types of things, what really constitutes a customer segment?

And a lot of people will fill that in with, oh, it has to be the industry. You're talking about FinTech or you're talking about logistics. But we very quickly realized that's not always the case. There's tons of products that are not industry focused. And so a lot of times when people work with positioning experts, they're like,

you have to niche down, you gotta choose an industry. And it's like, well, I can think of 50 companies that didn't do that. And so the definitions of all these words were very loose, which left a lot of ambiguity in the way that we talk about these things. So our current definition, when we say positioning, what we are actually talking about

is product positioning for a specific market segment. What we're not talking about is brand positioning, where you would say, what does Apple stand for? What makes them different? Well, they stand for things like innovation, creativity, breaking boundaries. That's like brand positioning stuff. And it's sort of like, no matter who you are in any type of buyer, you're

you could all view Apple and have kind of the same understanding of their overall brand positioning. Product positioning is much more specific and is a lot of times aimed at a particular group of people. And so any company will have...

many, many, many different product positionings. And so what we don't do is let's map out every single positioning for every single segment for you. That would take us years. What we do say is we say, let's help you figure out your primary product positioning for

for the primary market segment that you're going after. And then even one step further, we live mainly in B2B land. So a lot of the stuff I'm gonna say is gonna be business related software. This is not a framework for everyone for B2C and all that stuff. There's some overlap, but in the business world, it's not just for the primary positioning, for the primary segment, but also for the primary, we would call it like buying champion segment.

which is usually someone in the role who's not the end user. It's also not the executive. If it's a multi six figure deal, or even like if something's more than 10 K, you're going to have multiple stakeholders. So we're not actually mapping out positioning for what is the executive? How do you position for executive? How does this run user? We're mainly figuring out what would

we need to say to the buying champion? And we've seen this in the data that we know people who run qualitative studies and quantitative studies that basically most B2B software purchases are championed by one person and likely they're a manager or a director level. They're not going to be a VP. They're not going to be a C-level and they're not going to be like an intern or someone low. So what we're really talking about when we say positioning is framing the value of our product against competitive alternatives related to the specific segment and specific person that

And getting that into a simple, cohesive message. And then most positioning experts stop there, which is cool strategy work, really fun. And there's people who have made a lot of money doing strategy work where you walk away with a multi six figure PowerPoint deck. We always found that companies, when they get those strategy decks, it's easy to make a decision in a boardroom.

and very difficult to actually actualize that across the business. And so we said, is there a place we can document this strategy decision that will be a forcing function to get everyone to actually bring it to life? And what we have discovered is the homepage is a great place for this to live. So if you can answer these very, very trade-off related prioritization questions of who

really is our most important buying champion in our most important segment? And what would they compare us against? And what would our value be to them? If you can get a group of people to agree on the answers to that question in a business,

And then rewrite the homepage, even just main the first hero section to reflect the answers to that question. The whole company will be so much more likely to be pulling in the same direction. And ideally that customer segment is driving the most revenue for you is the most important to win over tells most people about you and will see themselves in it. And what that means is kind of deprioritizing a bunch of these other different segments and

maybe relegating them to lower parts on the homepage, to different go-to-market plans, maybe not calling them out at all. So that's kind of like at a high level, hopefully sort of tactical, but that's how we're thinking about it. It's really answering those questions. Who is your product for? What really is it? And then what does it really replace?

Got it. And I'm, you know, I'm on your website now. As I said, it's FletchPMM.com. And you have, well, A, a content library that I want to call out. I'll probably mention it again later, but folks can pay $50 one time to kind of, you haven't written a book on this yet.

And this is the closest thing you're telling me to like a definitive thing. There's notion templates, Figma templates, and other stuff if folks want to dig deeper. But I'm also looking at your before and after, which is, you know, you've done these 400, you know, engagements. And I just picked kind of picked one randomly. It's called user evidence. And the prior H1 is turn happy customers into your best sellers. And just...

Generate verified competitive intelligence, product stats and ROI data that credibly proves the value of your product. And the after is don't beg for case studies, get customer proof at scale. So this is running a process, right? You have a methodology that took them from there to there. The reason I'm bringing this up is I want people to understand the specificity of your methodology and what it's spit out after. When I say don't beg for case studies, get customer proof at scale,

I've pretty good idea what that is. And the prior one is turn happy customers into your best sellers. It's like, I don't know. I'm kind of confused by that if I'm being honest. Do you want to comment at all on what you did with user evidence? Or you can just dive into the methodology and kind of talk us through what it is, how you think about it, how you get there.

Since it is an audio podcast, I'll try to do it in the most audio friendly way because a lot of if you see our stuff, if you look around in our content or whatever, it's a lot of diagrams and colored boxes with arrows and stuff. So I would say the two biggest insights that we don't see represented in other positioning work is two aspects of your target customer segment that

that don't really get normally expressed. When we think of who is your target customer, we usually think of firmographics, demographics,

Sort of things you could build a list in LinkedIn ads or, you know, buy a list of it on the internet would be, well, we work with companies of X size that have X amount of revenue that are doing X amount of whatever, whatever your, your criteria of a perfect customer looks like. That's usually as far as people go. And so they say, that's our ICP. We have realized that with software, particularly what is actually more important is

than any of those firmographic things is the actual use case or workflow or activity or business process that is being done or it needs to be thinking about being done by the group of people you're trying to sell to. And so there's the phrase jobs to be done.

We avoided that phrase from the beginning because there's really a lot of schools of thought of what that means. People will say like, you know, I want to grow my business or increase my revenue is a job to be done. And in certain ways of defining it, that's true. But we take much more of a functional workflow approach. So we would say if you're selling cold email software, you might have a company that meets every single criteria of the software itself that you would want to sell to them.

But if they are not doing cold outbound, if they don't have the workflow that your product supports,

They're not in your ICP. And so to put it even simpler, right, all software for B2B is workflow software. And so the most important way to segment a market is by segmenting it by actual workflows that are being done by real people in the business. And so you can think about a job description, that when you think about an account executive in a sales team, there are bullet points of activities that they need to do.

And so those types of ways of segmenting a market by those actual activities, that's the most important thing that you can really land. And so take something like the user evidence example that you pulled up. I've got it up here in front of me as well. Turn happy customers into your best sellers. It is a message that is devoid of a workflow, right?

Right. And you can, you could, the way the, the kind of litmus test is if you imagine two people asking for like recommendations on a software vendor, one example is they would say, do you know someone who can help us collect case studies? That's a workflow. That's would be on someone's job description, a customer marketer. That's one of their job description is collect case studies. So you could say, Hey, we think we need to increase this or do that or whatever. And we think getting more case studies is,

will help us? Do you know anyone who could help us collect case studies? Or do you know of software that automates the collection of case studies? That's a workflow. That's a real conversation that two people might have. It's much less common for people to ping their network and say, do you know someone who can help me turn happy customers into your best sellers? That's

That's an outcome-laden language, but it's not how people shop. People shop, they refer at the level of workflows. Do you know the best way that we could collect customers' case studies? And so really a big thing that we're helping people do is narrow down to the very specific workflows that the software would help them do. Because people buy software to help them do their job. Right?

So telling them what part of my job are you going to help me with from, you know, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Tuesday? Here's what I do. Will you help me with that?

And a lot of times, especially in business software, we've been trained to just speak in outcomes. We say, no one cares about the product. They just care about the outcome. Just tell them you're going to increase their pipeline. But they actually want to know if I'm going to buy this software, what part of my life will you help with? So the big thing that I would say, the biggest insight for us with companies is helping them build these workflow-based segments

And then on the flip side, the other aspect, which is never in there, is what is the competitive alternative? There's lots of flavors of this, but collecting case studies, let's say that's the workflow. A competitive alternative could be another software platform or it could be like a manual process. And when we went through this process with them, they realized that no one was really using software for this. So to say we're the best competitor

customer feedback collection tool on the market were way better than all the other tools, that would not resonate because their target market actually is just begging, going around one by one and asking people for them. So it's really like figuring out which market do you want to play in? It's loosely tied to that workflow and then the competitive alternative way of accomplishing the workflow and building your positioning, your segmentation around those and not just building it around firmographic based segments.

Thank you.

We'll have focused morning work sessions where you'll gain clarity on your business challenges, followed by unforgettable afternoon excursions exploring the best of London. And then we'll end each night with a reception. Tickets are limited, so head over to microconf.com slash retreat to secure your spot. We will sell this event out. If you want to go to the MicroConf Growth Retreat in London, head to microconf.com slash retreat.

And remind me again, since we are on audio mode and I'm trying to remember the questions, right? And in a diagram, this is really easy to see. And obviously folks can go, I want to refer them to your LinkedIn actually. Anthony Pieri, P-I-E-R-R-I, you're putting out this stuff. Like if you ever write a book on this, it's probably going to be a compilation of your and your co-founder's LinkedIn posts. I didn't clean up because you put out the book, you know, books were the content on this. But remind me again, what were the, were there like three questions that we're asking? Yeah.

There were, yes. So that first question is, who is your product for? And so answering that question, not just with it's for sales teams, like a department, not just answering it with it's for people in mid-market B2B SaaS companies, some sort of firmographic, it's

It's saying, who are doing this workflow? Who are collecting customer case studies? Would be in that example, the segment. Who is my software for? It's for customer marketing teams and B2B software companies that are collecting case studies, workflow. And then that last piece is competitive alternative. How are they doing it today?

And it might be for them begging for customer case studies one by one. That right there is a marketable, positionable segment that you could really go and write a crystal clear message for. If you take out the workflow, if you take out the competitive alternative, you're left with a very broad...

make your life better, make your business more successful type of message. So getting it down to that level, right? And the other thing that's tricky about this is workflows can be very big and broad, or they can be very, very small. And so a very broad workflow could be like,

doing sales or doing marketing that's a workflow that's multi-person multi-faceted very very broad and so if you say well how do you do marketing today what's your competitive alternative our generic marketing agency or something like that right you'd be like well we do it ourselves like you're you're dealing in this like muddy if you pick too broad of a workflow your message is going to be so unclear and not sharpened and all that stuff and so you can you have to abstract a

down levels of specificity to find the one that is like, this is actually what our software does. It really helps you collect data.

and present case studies in all sorts of interesting ways. And so that's where the level of positioning actually makes sense is to segment that who is it for question, not just by the firmographics, but also by what do they have to be doing and what would they be considering in related to doing it that way? So that's the first question, who is it for? Then the other two questions are, what is it? Which is the product category that you play in. Do you call yourself a survey tool? Do you call yourself a customer feedback platform?

It's really that product category and there's, you know, mature categories that you could just jump right into or

Or there's really sexy new ones that are emerging and might take and might not. There's risks associated with whichever one you want to call yourself. And then that last question is what makes you better? And really, it's what makes you better than the competitive alternative? Why are you an improvement on them? And so that's where you start to talk about your differentiation, what you bring to the table. How do you accomplish that workflow better than the way that they've been doing it in the past?

All right, so my last SaaS app that I sold in 2016 was called Drip. You can still see it at drip.com. And it started as email marketing, then it became marketing automation. The headline now is totally different than what we had back then. But the headline, the H1 at the time, which I would venture to say was kind of our positioning, was lightweight marketing automation that doesn't suck.

That was the next one. A couple of friends of my mastermind said you should consider something like that. It was not contentious, but it was thought-provoking. The word suck kind of drove some people away, but it brought people to us. And we had a few different ICPs. It was like SaaS marketers slash founders, if they were in my audience. And it was info product and course sellers. Today we call the creator economy. That phrase didn't exist in 2012 when we started building this.

and agencies. There were like agencies and consultants that wanted to manage their email list and they wanted some workflows and they wanted to identify. We had lead scoring and other things like that. In your opinion, is that an okay headline and position or do you feel like

applying your methodology would have been an upgrade. Or I guess just to get your thoughts on that. It worked for us at the time, but then again, I didn't try five different headlines. I didn't try other positioning. Yeah, and so just some inherent audience selection things that come from that headline that you can sort of reverse engineer.

One, you're choosing a segment of people who A, are trying to automate their marketing. B, are aware of the marketing automation software category. C, have softwares

some level of understanding that those platforms are pretty bad. And then D, right, that you could credibly make a case that Drip would be a big improvement. So that is a segment of people doing this workflow with competitive alternative tools in the same category as you. And then you're coming in and positioning against the category and saying, we actually are a better way of doing this specific set of tasks.

That's one segment. And it's always for us, what we try to do, it's less of like a conversion rate optimization exercise, because for that group, you could phrase that 10 different ways, run A, B tests and find which one would resonate the most. The types of positioning shifts that we would bring to the table, and really we bring them as options. We say, have you considered that you could go after these other groups? You might, A, say,

see, and this is all dependent on like maturity of the market. Like are there marketers who don't think that they're using marketing automation platforms or are just not shopping for that? Maybe this, these first time creators, maybe they're not using dedicated tools. Maybe they're manually stringing together a bunch of stuff. So that's right there. That's already a fork in the road segment. And for email marketing, right? Or marketing automation is a very mature space.

But to give you a crazy example, like if you think of something like a credit card, say you launch a new credit card and you want to say why you're the best credit card, you could think, well, the only way I could do this would be to position myself against other credit cards because it's such a mature category. But again, it's a segment based question. There are entire countries in like Africa and places far away from the United States where they call it the unbanked.

that there are people who have no bank account, no credit card, no debit card at all. And so for them, the workflow of like storing money or borrowing money, the competitive alternative is very different. And you wouldn't be like the credit card that doesn't suck. If I decided to go after the people in the unbanked countries and thought that's where the money market is going to be, it would just be a completely different message with a different competitive alternative, different framing, different differentiation. And so, um,

It really is a question of segment by saying email attribution or sorry, email marketing that doesn't suck. You are making a choice. You're saying I'm going after the people who already know what this is, experience in the space. And again, is that the best thing for your business? This is where it's kind of we get into like the bet language. You know, it's like, where do I think my growth could come from? Like I think of a company like Slack. Slack now sort of assumes that

that everybody knows who they are. And so when you read their website, it's a super vague, like, I think they have a slogan where work happens, and they don't really call themselves what they actually do, which is like a messaging app, like an internal communication tool or something like that. They've really expanded it and things like that. And so you're basically saying, okay, well, you're making a decision to position for people who already kind of know what the space looks like and the options.

When you could make the argument that they have said explicitly that their TAM, the total number of people who could work with them, is a billion knowledge workers. And they have, I think, 40 million users. So they've got 4% market penetration. The biggest company in their space, Microsoft Teams, has like, I think like,

maybe 250 million or something like that. They've got 25% market penetration. What's the rest of the people using? Are they using other direct competitors or are most of them using email? And the early Slack positioning was against email. It was like a better way to do email, like an email replacement, you know, all that type of stuff. To me, I'm like, you might have more of a chance to grow the business by going after the 700 million people or whatever left who

who are probably still running their companies primarily on email, then you would living in this like very clearly, like we all kind of know what we're doing and we know what teams is and we know what Slack is and we just, we don't have to be specific anymore. So like those are the types of things that you're weighing when you're making positioning shifts. You're really saying like, do I want to keep pointing the company at the same group? Do I want to expand it? Do I want to pivot it? And what would be the implications of any of those decisions? Yeah.

Yeah, I have this phrase that I say a lot on this podcast, which is being a founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information. And people who think they can get all the data and 100% data, that's bull****.

And even data can be twisted, even at big companies where they have a lot of data, there's always some gut feel, there's always some intuition, and especially early stage. And early stage, I mean, geez, until you're eight figures, like there's a lot of just like, hey, I'm going to go with the founder gut feel. Because I can imagine someone listening to our conversation and hearing you spit out a headline, you know, based on your methodology and saying, how do I know that's right?

And you don't. You don't know that's right. But you do need to read it and say, does this sound good? Do I think that's reasonable? Does it describe the product? Am I willing to test this out for a month or two or three? That's the idea behind any of this is we're taking our best guess based on some pattern matching, based on some founder gut feel, based on the methodology and just putting stuff in place and the

then gathering data, right? And saying, hey, is this working? Like, do we feel like this is better? And I can't describe how often I will make a decision that I'm like, this just feels right. And this other one doesn't feel right. And it's hard to teach someone. How do you teach someone how to do it? And I'm not always right. But often enough, you don't have to be right all the time, just enough of the time. And the thing to even confound it more is that

You can look and say, how is it going? Is it working? Is it not working? Lean Startup had that great phrase in the early 2000s, which was the pivot or persevere. Do I want to stick with the people that I've been going after or do I want to go after a new segment? And so you have these examples, right, of companies like

where Zoom for many, many years was not doing very well. Zoom was positioned as this video chat solution for businesses. And up until 2019, they were not doing so hot. They're getting beat by all the other people. And so you could look at them and say like, man, maybe the positioning strategy is not working. We're not going after the right people. We're not using the right differentiation, whatever it might be.

And then 2020, we have the pandemic hit and all of a sudden it is the right positioning and they're skyrockets of the most valuable company, you know, for a while. And so that's the other element is like, you can look at your existing customer base and say, what's working with them. But it's so difficult to know, like, I've

a former colleague of mine would talk about the local maxima or the global maxima. Like, am I at the top of a small mountain and there's a giant mountain right over there that I could be on? Or if I really reach, like I'm at the top of the mountain of all the mountains in the surrounding area. And so you can, like you're saying, you can look at Google, look at that list of like the Google cemetery of all the products, save sunset. There is probably no more data driven company in the planet than Google who has more data on their customers has been collecting it for 20 plus years.

And they still will launch products that they would consider failures and are killing them and sunsetting them all the time. Yeah, none of this is easy, that's for sure. So as we wrap up, I want to ask, do you have, I mean...

lessons learned, most common mistakes that you see, again, having done more than 400 of these exercises through this methodology. Is there something that just crops up over and over that you kind of either grown at or, you know, some learning you can share with folks? Yeah, I think the biggest learning will come as zero surprise to your audience.

It's that founders who try to do too much will fail and they spread themselves really thin and they try to go after all these different segments at the same time. And they don't understand the implications that if you target 10 different workflows, the likelihood that in those conversations where someone says, do you know anyone who helps who, or, you know, any software that does cold outreach or cold email software, if that's one of their 10 and they have nine other ones and they have a small team,

The likelihood that they could win in all 10 of those markets, when people are referring, they think of, oh, they do that. It's just not going to happen. And so we work with primarily venture-backed companies for the most part. We still do work with bootstrap companies. The bootstrap companies are always more fun to work with because they already kind of believe the same things we believe, you know? And we try to get the venture-backed companies involved.

to act like bootstrapping companies. We're like, listen, I know you want to be a billion dollar company, right? The path there is not that different than anyone else. Like you, you can look at Amazon. They were just doing books for a while, which we all forgot. And then they owned books and then they expanded. Like, have you dominated a tiny niche yet?

And if so, then fine. Now we can start expanding and getting bigger and broader. But most of the people we work with are early stage and have not dominated anything. And so for us, it's really being very honed in on the positioning, hyper-specific to get your initial traction because it's just hard to be thought of for anything, right? Like the mental availability concept is extremely difficult. And so, you know, when I met a bunch of people at the conference,

They were doing things like the one guy, he was doing software for laundromats, like self-service laundromats. And it was like, to me, that's incredible. And he had built this really powerful business. They were doing great. Their margins were unreal. And it's like, okay, if that was a venture-backed founder, he could probably then start layering on new types of businesses to expand because he had already been dominating in the small one.

It's the same path, right? And so you don't have to quell your vision. You could still want to be the unicorn. But for the vast, vast majority of founders, you would be so much better served by like we would say sequencing these segments, right? Like don't go after all of them at once.

Pick one, go deep. If it's the wrong one, you could either pivot or persevere. And then once you've dominated, layer on the next one. And like one last example, Spotify, a company we all probably know, they were doing just music for 10 years. And then they became the number one market leader and they IPO'd and then they launched podcasts. And then they did podcasts until they became the number one market leader in podcasts. And now they've launched audiobooks. Like

Like that to me is like, and their venture scale and all that stuff. Win the small market first, and then you can lay around the other ones. And then when you're the market leader there, go bigger.

Anthony, it's been great having you on the show, man. So folks want to keep up with you and get this awesome free content you keep putting out. Anthony Pieri, P-I-E-R-I on LinkedIn. If folks want to see your full MicroConf talk you gave in New Orleans just a few weeks ago, they can head to microconf.com slash US and the talks are available for sale there. I think it's a hundred bucks and they get all the talks, but they can...

Look at this with visuals, everything we've talked through today, but with visuals and more examples, obviously, as a structured talk would have. And then the last thing I want to point out is FletchPMM.com, which is your consulting agency. And not only do you have the content library I mentioned earlier that folks can buy for 50 bucks, but you have an agency and your prices range from 7,500 one time up to 15,000, depending on the size of the company. If someone's listening to this and they're just like, look, can you just do this for me? Those are your options. So...

Once again, man, thanks so much for joining me on the show. Yeah, it was a blast. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much to Anthony for joining me on the show. And thanks to you for joining me this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 772.