June 11, 2025 • 31 mins
We sit down with Anuj Adhiya, author and growth strategist, to explore why many startups struggle to maintain growth. Anuj shares his expert insights on the common pitfalls that hinder startups, such as misaligned product-market fit and ineffective activation strategies. Tune in to learn how to build a solid foundation for sustainable growth and avoid the typical traps that can derail your success.
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Connect with Anuj Adhiya:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujadhiya/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnujAdhiya
Connect with Chris Troka:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-troka-3a093058/
Website: https://focused-biz.com/
Website: https://christroka.com/ #brainwork #framework #business #marketing #strategies #author
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Nobody should be growing anythingthat hasn't been validated.
And this is not a you thing.
This is a me thing.
So if you're saying growth, by definition,you and I are saying it's been validated.
There's signs of product market fit,and all product market fit is a test of
retention with a very specific segment.
You are listening to Brainwork Framework,a Business and Marketing podcast,
brought to you by Focused-biz.com.
(00:22):
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is the authorof Growth Hacking for Dummies.
He helps startup founders and headsof growth breakthrough plateaus
by aligning product, marketing anddata to drive sustAInable growth.
Anuj Adhiya with GrowthHacking for Dummies.
So excited to have you here.
How you doing?
Couldn't be happier to be hereand nerd out some more with you.
So tell us more about your journey.
What were you doing before thatled you into what you're doing now?
(00:44):
Yeah.
This is sort of an accidental careerfor me 'cause I have degrees in
chemistry and biochemistry and I'mdoing startup growth, which sounds
like those shouldn't make sense.
But the way I was told that the two areconnected was actually by Sean Ellis, who
is the godfather of growth hacking andhe said that all this fancy growth stuff
(01:04):
is nothing but applying the scientificmethod to product and marketing.
So in school, if you were in chem lab andyou did those color changing experiments
with the drops, you know how to dothat and you remember how to do that?
Congratulations.
You know how to do growth.
You try stuff, you see what doesn't work,you use that information to find out what
does work and then you do more of that.
(01:25):
That's growth and growthhacking in a nutshell for you.
it was a completelyaccidental career for me
'cause I had one mad moment thought.
I'd wanted to found a startup,knowing nothing about startups at all.
Including not knowing what marketingmeant, what sales meant, MVP.
I knew none of that 'cause I didn'tcome from this world and started the
(01:47):
journey of learning who to followon Twitter and Sean was one of them.
And September 30th, 2013 was the day mylife changed because of all the thousands
of tweets I could have seen that day.
I see one from Sean that says, launchinga thing called growth hackers.com.
Come check it out.
I click on it and voila, it's acommunity discussing startupy,
things like this is great.
(02:09):
And I start to engage in the communitynot knowing anything even how important
it is for people to engage in a brandnew community that needs traction
and not knowing that it was a smallcommunity and Sean himself was involved.
You are the growth person and youstart to get sort of recognition
(02:31):
by people you look up to andsuddenly this thing becomes a habit.
And a year later, I'm the mostactive member on the community
and get asked to moderate itjust because that's what I was
doing already in my free time.
And a year later was just having arandom conversation with Sean and
basically it was just supposed to be a15 minute catch up and it turned into
(02:52):
an hour and a half long call aboutmaybe why I should be joining the team.
And we have this call,we both sleep on it.
We come back the next day and we'relike, how do you feel about it?
I'm like, great.
So I stumbled into my first startupand first growth gig with the guy
that coined the phrase growth hacking.
But it was all organic.
(03:12):
There was nothing planned about it.
I was just interested in the topic andso I didn't have to fake engagement
or interest but that clearlytranslated into something that worked
and helped the community as well.
So when I joined, it wastransitioning from this passion
project into a full on business.
And that's what really happenedover the next four years.
(03:32):
It became this community that morphedinto everything from events to a book to
online trAIning, a SaaS product and becamean actual revenue generating business.
And there were days I was pinching myself.
I'm like, I can't believeI'm getting pAId to do this.
It was a lot of fun.
And Sean's whole thing was, there isonly one growth hack 'cause he gets asked
the question all the time and I'm sureevery person who does growth gets asked.
(03:56):
What's the magic bullet?
Right?
And there is none
but if there is one, it is yourrate of learning because that's
really all things being equal.
The startup that learns fastest aboutwhat works and doesn't work about
their audience is the one that's gonnaexecute their competition and win.
So was his mandate for us is, I don'tcare what you do, I need you to run
(04:18):
at least three plus tests a week.
And I was there four years.
So do the math.
That was a lot of tests.
At least 158 per year.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
Man, super cool.
But you didn't evenexpect to go into this.
You were just genuinely helping thiscommunity by engaging in the posts and
being as helpful as you could and thatkind of hobby and passion turned into a
job opportunity and more opportunities.
(04:40):
So now you've built some productsonline that are making money.
You mentioned both the book and SaaS.
Are you focused on your ownbusiness or is your business just
helping the other businesses?
Yeah, so since maybe late 2020, early2021, I've been consulting 'cause like
just being in that community openedout a lot of doors for me including
the opportunity to write the bookincluding many other full-time roles
(05:05):
I didn't have to interview for justdoors got opened, people knew me
and got the chance to mentor people.
So at places I never envisioned,like, Harvard Innovation Labs or
Techstars or other accelerators.
And that's when I started to realize thata lot of these questions are the same and
maybe there's something else I could do tomake my dent in the startup failure rate.
(05:27):
Given all the people out there that haveall the experience and knowledge that
people like you, me, and others haveit's kind of stupid that the startup
failure rate is still as high as it is,
Right.
You would think with all the accessto resources and other business owners
who are willing to lend an ear ora little bit of advice, you would
expect the failure rate to be lower.
(05:49):
Exactly.
But it's not right.
And clearly there's nuances there in termsof the demographics that this applies
to that was also part of the reasoningbehind the book was like, here's a way
to scale impact a little bit or go andwork with an accelerator and get to work
with more than one startup at a time.
And the consulting was more my way ofkeeping myself current with what's new
(06:11):
and what's happening, what I can dowith what I'm learning today because
let's face it, given everything that'shappening and now since the last two
years with AI coming into the mix.
I feel obsolete every week.
It's changing so quickly.
It's hard to keep up.
Right.
And I'm constantly trying to find ways andconsulting is just one way to keep myself
(06:32):
on my toes and say, okay, what's thelatest I can learn and bring to the table?
And I raise the odds of success somewhere.
Yes, absolutely.
And I think this is your story isjust a testament to whether you have
experience in a certain field or not.
If you have this always be learningmindset and be willing to be
helpful, you can become an expertin a brand new field and bring a new
(06:52):
perspective and help a lot of people.
And suddenly, like you said,these doors are opening for you.
It's not like you were searching them out.
If you kind of put yourself intothis mindset, suddenly the doors
are gonna open and it's up to youif you wanna walk through them and
you decided, Hey, I'm gonna walkthrough and I'm gonna run with it.
Totally.
And you're absolutely right with you don'thave to have experience thing because I
(07:12):
noticed this when I first got onto GrowthHackers and when that lesson actually
hit me is just by spending all the time Idid in the community for a while actually
became the living brAIn of the community.
I knew everything that was posted.
And so I would see these new discussionshappen and without having gotten my
(07:33):
fingers dirty with anything practicalwith growth, my value add was saying,
Hey, I saw an article two weeks backthat said the same thing or I saw
one that said the exact opposite.
And just that ability to connectdots and say, okay, here's something
complimentary or here's somethingthat's saying the opposite.
So I think is sort of proves yourpoint out that you really don't
have to know much but just immersingyourself in something allows you to
(07:56):
see patterns that other people don't.
That's a great starting point.
Absolutely.
A lot of businesses who aretrying to grow and scale fail.
How do we kind of fix that?
What are they doing wrong and whatshould our attention be focused on?
How much time do we have but I'llgive you the most common things I
see because now clearly most startupsfail before product market fit right?
(08:18):
And there's a lot written about the mostcommon causes of failure or you build
the wrong thing or you build somethingnobody wants and all of those are true,
but what they don't say, I think is thatall of that is a function of learning
the wrong thing at the wrong time.
And that's one big thing isbecause there's an order to things
(08:39):
and there's a context to things.
There'll be some influencer onLinkedIn who will say something
and people will follow that stuff
not realizing that that doesnot apply to their context.
And this is especially true of first timefounders who don't come from this world
but don't know better and then just followwhat some big name says or something
that sounded good or sounded like, oh, ifwe don't do this, we'll be left behind.
(09:03):
So I think, that's a huge piecefor me is just learning the
wrong thing at the wrong time.
And I'll throw out aresource for this as well.
A book I must have recommended to atleast 200 founders is running Lean
by Ash Moria and it's up to its thirdversion right now but that's a great
book and probably the one of the bestbooks I've read for a first time founder
(09:26):
wanting to raise their odds of hittingproduct market fit or learning quickly.
There's nothing there because you learnthe right thing in the right order.
Excellent.
Thank you.
And the second thing which is tied toall of this and relates to something
we spoke about earlier, it is that rateof learning because that doesn't change
no matter what, because you have verylittle money resource at that time and
(09:49):
if you're serious about this, your paceof learning needs to be quick for you
to understand and so one of my favoritequestions and this applies to pre or
post product market teams, is are wesmarter this week than we were last week?
and that doesn't have to bethese earth shattering insights.
It's just we should be doingsomething different or something
(10:11):
more every week because that'show you build momentum on things.
If cannot answer at an individuallevel at least I'm smarter because
I learned what not to do, which isa lot of what you learn is I'm just
shouldn't do any of this anymore.
Great.
But then what else should you do?
So either you learn something that toldyou, do more of it, or you learn something
(10:32):
that says, don't do any more of this.
Do something else.
At the very least, that's what youshould have learned every week.
Apply that construct toeverybody on the team.
That is how a team builds true momentumbecause that is actual learning happening
at a team wide scale, helping and feedingback to the team as to, Hey, this person
learned X, this person learned Y Allof us should be smarter now, not just
(10:55):
you as the CEO or you as the founderdoing the learning while everybody else
does whatever the hell they feel like.
Yes, because they're just kindof running in all different
directions without clarity.
Correct.
Both of these pieces Ithink have to come together.
You have to understand whatis our focus right now.
So you learn the right thing at the righttime and then build momentum towards that
with testing, experimentation, what it is.
(11:17):
So you can be smarter every week.
Yes, absolutely.
And when people are trying to find thatproduct market fit and validate their
product, I see a lot of people failingby spending all their time building
their new SaaS or their new app ortheir new product or service and they
haven't even asked their potentialtarget market, do you want this?
Would you pay money for this?
Is this a need?
Is this gonna solve any of your problems?
(11:38):
And oftentimes they spend so much timetrying to make it fit to an audience
and they end up going back to squareone thinking the product wasn't good
enough when really they maybe justneed to try a different audience.
So it's something with scalableacquisition I think is important as well,
is there's all different channels we cando social media, we can do more organic,
we can do SEO, we can do pAId ads.
(12:00):
Sure it's nice to have a multi-channelapproach and do some experiments
but over time we're gonna get somedata back and we're gonna learn some
channels were not as profitable.
They didn't bring anything in.
How do you kinda look atwhat's working versus not?
What's working versus scaling your growth.
Sure.
Because you've just said the Gword, I'm gonna say something
that's a pet peeve of mine.
(12:20):
Nobody should be growing anythingthat hasn't been validated.
So, like a cat with standing up whenpeople use the growth word before product
market fit cause you're not growinganything, then you're just validating.
Yes.
And this is not a you thing.
This is a me thing.
Right.
So if you're saying growth by definition,you and I are saying it's been validated.
There are signs of product market fitand all product market fit is a test of
(12:43):
retention with a very specific segment.
That's all it is.
So if you have now a bunch of peoplethat keep coming back week after week,
you have to use that information tohelp you grow and I'll come back to
that in a second because the most commonthing I see is, oh, product market fit.
Let's blow this thing up.
Let's run a bunch of ads.
We are gonna go viral on TikTok,TechCrunch, product hunt launches,
(13:05):
whatever and that's absolutelythe wrong approach because none
of those have been validated asapproaches that you should be using
instead what is a better approachis to understand more about.
So the kind of person that finds themost value and you literally ask people
this question, what kind of personwould benefit most from this product?
(13:28):
And see, record how people describethemselves because you might think it's a
social media marketer or a product manageror a lifecycle marketer, or a CEO that
may not be how they describe themselves.
So you want the words and I thinkthis is one of the most underrated
aspects of starting up marketing growthis language that people respond to
(13:50):
language that they feel mirrored in.
Why do we laugh at certain jokes?
It's because it's our sense of humor.
Why do we respond to certainSuper Bowl ads versus not others?
It's literally they'respeaking our language, right?
So language is really important tostart to tease out and I think asking
the question of what kind of persongets to not only the language but
(14:10):
tactically, if you're gonna target people,you're gonna target people like that.
That's how you build your Facebookaudiences or whatever it is.
Don't just randomly say, I'm gonnatarget tech entrepreneurs who are in
their thirties, that's meaningless.
Right and we can't grow or scaleads or any sort of marketing if we
don't understand the audience or whowe're trying to target and especially
if that same audience that we'reassuming is titled themselves a
(14:34):
certain way, they're actually quitedifferent and your targeting would've
been way off and you're not actuallyreaching the right people anymore.
So that's one.
The next thing I wanna ask is, howdo you even find out about us?
And some of these may havebeen personal connections.
Somebody told me, Hey, I saw a poston LinkedIn but if you were to ask
all the people, I'm sure there'll be.
This Pareto that will show upwith at least one or two channels
(14:56):
that are bigger than others.
Guess what?
That's your order of testing channels.
You don't need to do aTikTok and LinkedIn ads.
Or literally follow what people youknow have found you with right now.
And just stick with what works.
Just ask them.
Absolutely.
Cause anybody who spent anytime in this space knows what a
total cluster attribution is soit's like, just forget about it.
(15:18):
Just ask people.
You don't have to be exact about it.
Get trends, double down on those.
So that's second and the thirdquestion I like to ask then is so
what's the primary benefit you found?
Because again, these are peoplewho keep coming back, right?
So clearly they find some benefit in it.
You need to understand what it is,how do they describe the benefit?
Which again, goes back to languagebecause for me, this is the
(15:40):
Holy Trinity of all marketing.
Who do you target with?
What message in what channel?
We nAIled it.
That's the trinity of marketing.
We need those three areas
correct.
And so there's no need to break yourhead or literally ask your people
and ask them to use their words.
There is a pot of gold justwAIting at the end of the rainbow
and we often get distracted.
The answer was here the whole time.
It was right under my nose and wealmost feel stupid for not knowing
(16:03):
or forgetting that like, oh wow.
I do have a list of customers.
I should really solicit theirfeedback to get their thoughts on.
Right.
So now you have something that youhave some learning around that you
can test against 'cause I think peoplewant to move straight into something.
They want to do scale and profitabilityat the same time and you really can't
(16:26):
because again, product market fit bydefinition is its smaller numbers, right?
So what you're trying to doafter that is say, okay, I found
these many people like this.
How many more can I find?
Now it's about scale in terms of purenumbers but it's only if you can get
that working like, okay, now I canrepeatedly get more people and reliably.
So week after week or month after month.
(16:48):
Great.
Now can I do this profitably?
Once I've learned how to get themin the door in the first place
and all of this again goes backto there's an order to things.
Yeah.
And if we're jumping ahead and kind ofmissing steps, this is something within
the buyer's journey they might experiencesome friction or confusion and they
can't quite understand what it is they'rebuying or how it's gonna help them.
(17:08):
So they kind of fall off and you're nevergonna get them to convert and keep them
there that retention is gonna fall off.
I'm glad you mentioned thiscause I hear this all the time.
Found product market fit and ofcourse some VC told them or asked
them about how many users do you have?
How many downloads do you have?
How many signups do you have?
That's the absolute wrong questionbecause acquisition is a solved problem.
(17:29):
There are no secret channels,there's no users on Mars that
only we know about, right?
All the channels are known.
It's just we aren't experts in them.
And my bias is, okay,you are not an expert.
Whatever budget you have, go hire the bestperson you can, freelancer whatever that
lives and breeds that channel for you.
There's no reason for you to wastetime making mistakes that have
(17:51):
already been made and learnings thathave already been learned, right?
Just go hire somebody and solve.
So acquisition is really a solved problem.
What is unique about every productis retention and that's really the
question a VC should be asking.
A startup is not howmany signups do you have?
What is your retention rate over time?
Because that is the businessI want to invest in.
That shows strong retentionat that early stage.
(18:14):
And so the reason I bring this upbecause you said exactly the right
thing, is that if you haven't gottengood learning around the buyer's journey
before you start pouring gas, youmight as well just give me the money.
Why are you wasting it?
I tell founders this all the time,like, gimme a million bucks.
I promise you I will get a millionpeople to show up to your site
tomorrow can't promise you evenone and that is the trick, right?
(18:38):
And so there is this stage after youbelieve you have product market fit and
between really pouring gas on thingswhere you have to set the stage for growth
where you do exactly what youare saying because product market
fit just means I have value.
You have not understood the best wayto deliver this value yet and you
need to figure this bit out right?
(18:58):
So that's everything to do with afirst experience that you put people
through 'cause now you validated theaudience, like, okay, let me put more
of this audience through differentversions of this first experience
because if I put them throughthat experience, let me now see.
What my retention rate looks like overtime and what can I expect as users and
if people stay for this long, maybe Ican get these many users to pay whatever
(19:21):
that amount is, so I start to getsome signal, so now when I pour gas on
everything once I've validated this.
Now I can say, if I get a thousandpeople, I know 40% of them are gonna
hang out for at least one week.
I know that's gonna go down to 20% inweek two but it's gonna stay between 50
and 20% for at least three months after.
Right now I know.
(19:43):
So this is why I think Sean'swords were so resonant with me.
It's all about the scientific method andvalidation and somebody else way smarter
than me said that growth is nothing butretAIning product market fit over time.
And I never thought about it that way.
All too often I see peoplefocusing on trying to get new
leads, the top of the funnel.
They're just like, I just need toget more visibility, more eyes,
(20:04):
more people into the funnel.
And they don't realize what's sittingright there in the middle is the middle
of the funnel where people becomethat customer and they're either gonna
become a non-customer or they're gonnabecome a promoter of your service and
they're gonna become a referral partner.
That is where the money lies, andit's like focus on their experience
that first time user, how do we getthem to stay a bit longer and have
(20:26):
a better experience versus tryingto capture a brand new person.
I don't.
I think most people default to assumingtop of funnel is their problem.
It may be, I'm not discounting it butthe problem is that most people haven't
done the math of their growth and haven'tback engineered that if I need to make
this amount of revenue and this much timeand if my sales cycle is how many ever
(20:49):
months and my average selling prices.
Okay.
Based on that, let me see how wellmy funnel performs and let me make
some estimations about if it performslike this and if I improve it.
Overall by 10% or if I just improve mysign up to engagement conversion rate by
X or my free to pAId conversion or my demoto POC conversion, whatever it may be.
(21:13):
What is the impact of that moving forward?
Because if that is yourproblem, great, who cares?
Your top of funnel is notthe problem right now.
It may become a problem but if youdo all of this math and say, okay,
realistically I can't make somethinghappen in product better and really
there's a top of funnel problem, great.
Now go attack that and now use whatyou've learned about if it is a top
(21:37):
of funnel problem, what channelshave people already found me by?
Let me start there first and solve that.
But again, you've gotta do the math ofgrowth and this is what kind of goes
back to the earlier question you wereasking about why do most startups fail?
I think this is post-product market fit.
If there's a failure, I think it's becausethe math of growth hasn't been done.
(21:58):
Along with all of those other problems ofnot moving fast enough not learning fast
enough, focusing on the wrong areas andI think all of those are functions of not
modeling out your growth because if youdon't model it out, you don't understand
where your biggest choke point is.
And every business has a choke point.
It doesn't matter what else you fix.
If you don't fix that, it's game over.
Right.
And do you find one area tendsto be the most common choke
(22:21):
point for most businesses?
again, for all early startups, Ithink it is that first experience bit.
It's the user activation bit.
Everything flows from there.
Because I know people liketo call it onboarding and
activation and first experience.
All of that is nothing butshort term retention 'cause in
the user's brAIn, I don't thinkthey're thinking about it though.
They're like, am I using it or not?
Am I using it today?
Am I using it tomorrow?
(22:41):
Am I using it three months from now?
So I like to break it up toam I retAIning them short term?
Am I retAIning them medium term?
Am I retAIning them long term?
And all the first experiencestuff I think falls into that.
Absolutely.
Lot of great insight.
As far as trying to validate a productand grow and scale and doing it in the
right order because otherwise we'regonna run into a lot of trouble here.
(23:03):
You mentioned earlier AI and it's beenaround for a few years, arguably much
longer but now it's in a different space.
There's chat, GPT, deepseek, clo, grok, open AI.
AI is being integrated into every app.
Many businesses are trying tointegrate it into their own product.
And you contend that maybe that shouldn'tbe the focus, trying to stuff it into
your product but rather help improvethe efficiencies and operations that
(23:25):
you have running in the backend.
What are some ways that you'reusing AI or you do think other
businesses could use AI as well?
Yeah, I love this question because thisis literally the drum I'm beating this
year and I'm not saying that peopleshouldn't integrate AI into their
product but everybody's doing that.
So that's table stakes and I don'tthink that is a thing that's gonna
transform the trajectory of your companybecause it's sort of like acquisition.
There's no secret AI, like everybody'susing the same foundational models right?
(23:49):
So table stakes there.
What is or can be the differentiator issort of what we touched on earlier, right?
It is speed.
All things being equal, the one thatexecutes faster will win and I've
noticed this in my own work that myown speed of execution has gone up.
My own decision makingability has gone up.
My ability to visualize and try newthings that I might never have thought
(24:11):
about has gone up and when I startto put all of these things into the
context of workflows, that's where Ithink the true power of what moving
really fast means starts to come up.
I'll give you a quick, simple exampleof this from a personal standpoint
which came about talking to somebodyelse is literally building an AI
(24:32):
agent to auto respond to emailsbased on certain keywords and I
don't know how to code, right?
I'm literally using Google Sheets aconnector like make.com or Zapier,
open AI like chat GPT and Gmail.
That's it.
Nothing fancy.
And there's a system that I've almostput into place where I now have a bunch
(24:53):
of keywords in a Google sheet and Ihave a bunch of potential responses
based on those keywords 'cause theseare the kind of emails everybody has,
this is just a small experiment toget some busy work outta the way so
I can do actually stuff that mattersand focus on things that matter.
It's just one simpleto understand example.
Now my system will just look at theemail, it'll automatically generate a
(25:13):
response and put it in a draft readyfor me to approve or change things
around and it'll learn based on that.
And now start to think aboutthis from a business aspect.
How does something like this apply?
Like go back to what we weretalking about, talking to customers.
Everybody does customer research buttends to sit in silos and then you
meet and then you create slides andyou have all sorts of meetings but
imagine that you had a workflow thatwe'd have a call just like this,
(25:37):
there's an author AI transcript, imaginethat gets fed directly into chat GPT.
You can do this today.
Nothing fancy.
Nothing with a prompt that says,okay, analyze these, this conversation
or here's a hundred conversations.
Analyze all of these for patternson competitive intel or product
satisfaction or buying intentor whatever it is you want.
(25:59):
Prioritize this for me in orderof which one will help me sell
for the most or fastest or who totarget or whatever you want, right?
And now without additional work, itgenerated these insights from me.
I can use that to kickoff a whole new workflow.
This is great.
Now generate 20 experiments for me,each for a landing page Google ad
(26:22):
and email sequence all around thesame topic and give me 20 ideas for
things I can test in all of this.
this is like half an hour in whichall of this will happen versus
imagine what's gonna happen intoday's world or in yesterday's world.
This is weeks and months of work.
It is.
And I think there's a lotof analysis paralysis.
I had it too.
(26:42):
I still have it because of the noiseevery week but I'm just trying to simplify
stuff and say I'm just gonna use a fewtools and see how far I can take it.
I'm not gonna get distracted bythe noise of everything else.
See what I'm doing today that I canmove faster with just three, four
tools and everything centralizedaround a chat GPT or a clot on
(27:03):
everyday things I can use cheap.
I'm still on a free plan of make.com.
You don't need an enterprise accountto be able to make these APIs and AI
agents systems talk to each other.
Totally.
It's huge.
I love using AI and I'm a big fanof using it in workflows as well.
The AI generated responses,it can extract keywords and
information from the message body.
(27:25):
It can interpret that data andit can put it into certain fields
and suddenly it's crafting thispersonalized response at scale.
So usually that would take five to 10minutes to craft, even 30 minutes to
really do a nice follow up email that'spersonalized AI, like you said, it can
find the transcript from the video.
It can interpret and analyze it,it can produce something else.
I did an entire year's worth ofsocial media content through chat GPT
(27:48):
because I asked it I need in columnA, I need, a date from now until the
end of the year and a time in thisformat, and it gave me 50 of 'em.
I said, I need post titles.
I need this and it createdthis Excel sheet for me.
All I had to do was take that over tomy social media schedule and upload
it but this is just one of like,probably 20 processes I have with
like some sort of AI or automationthat just helps improve workflows.
(28:11):
It's a game changer and it'shelping a lot of solopreneurs get
access to these tools that the bigbox companies only had access to.
Totally.
But I think what's implicit in what yousaid, which I think is maybe part of why
some people at least are not finding asmuch success is an ability to ask good
questions and good follow ups 'cause thatmany times, that initial output isn't
(28:33):
really great and you need to massageit into something 'cause sometimes it
sounds good in theory but it's nevergonna work or it'll use words that
like, no, humans don't talk like that.
They don't behave like that.
Right?
So the point I'm getting at is,for people who don't know how to ask
good questions, I think to me thatis a better skill to learn, right now
(28:56):
'cause the output is the output, right?
The output is commoditized now.
I think it's the input that is moreimportant and I believe at least one
reason why maybe I can ask a betterquestion than some people is because
of actual experience doing the thing.
So I understand what I'm askingfor and I have a lot of context
behind what I'm asking for.
So I can see how this might bedifficult for newer people trying to
(29:20):
do something 'cause there's just noactual experience but that doesn't
mean you can't go get that experienceand just try some of that stuff.
Like if you're already trying toolsand blah, blah, on this side, spend
some time learning how to test becauseeven constructing a good hypothesis
is an exercise in asking a good questionbecause the output is binary and when
(29:41):
you don't get a binary output or you geta fuzzy response, it's a signal to you
that I didn't ask the question well, Ididn't formulate the hypothesis well.
So I think if we all learn to getbetter at hypothesis, not saying
I'm the best at it, I too haveto learn and get better at it.
But I feel like that is the kernel ofit all is even things we choose to do
on a day-to-day basis at work don'tthink of it as a thing I'm doing, think
(30:02):
of it through the lens of a hypothesis.
Like, why am I doing this?
So if I do expect to see Y, I'll measureit through Z. And I think reframing
that lens allows us to get better atasking questions, which then feeds
us better into prompts and the like.
Absolutely.
Now where can people find out more aboutyou and get connected with you online?
(30:23):
So I hang out on LinkedIn all the time.
I still hang out on X as well.
So both places are absolutely fine.
I will talk to anybody who wantsto nerd out about this stuff.
And we'll have those linksavAIlable down in the show notes
and the description for everybody.
Anuj, our last final question here isanything we haven't talked about today
that you would want to share as a pieceof advice to any starting entrepreneurs
(30:46):
or people who are kind of struggling,spinning their wheels right now?
What's the one thing you wantthem to take home with them?
Get yourself to the spot whereyou can say, I am smarter this
week than I was last week.
I promise you, it's a game changerwhen you can do this week after week
and if you get to this for four, sixweeks in a row, start asking yourself
(31:07):
that question every five days.
And if you do that six to eightweeks in a row, start asking
yourself every three days.
I promise you, you won'tbelieve how fast you're moving.
Like you won't recognizeyourself in six months.
I love it.
If we can be more activejust put ourselves out there.
Always be learning, trying to takein new information and be a helpful
resource in a lot of communities.
(31:28):
A lot of that is gonna lead intoour success and ultimately, leading
us to make better decisions.
Anuj, we appreciate your timeand sharing all your wisdom, tips
and tricks with us for growthhacking and just business scaling.
We appreciate it.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
This a lot of fun.
Nobody should be growing anythingthat hasn't been validated.
And this is not a you thing.
This is a me thing.
So if you're saying growth, by definition,you and I are saying it's been validated.
There's signs of product market fit,and all product market fit is a test of
retention with a very specific segment.
You are listening to Brainwork Framework,a Business and Marketing podcast,
brought to you by Focused-biz.com.
(00:22):
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is the authorof Growth Hacking for Dummies.
He helps startup founders and headsof growth breakthrough plateaus
by aligning product, marketing anddata to drive sustAInable growth.
Anuj Adhiya with GrowthHacking for Dummies.
So excited to have you here.
How you doing?
Couldn't be happier to be hereand nerd out some more with you.
So tell us more about your journey.
What were you doing before thatled you into what you're doing now?
(00:44):
Yeah.
This is sort of an accidental careerfor me 'cause I have degrees in
chemistry and biochemistry and I'mdoing startup growth, which sounds
like those shouldn't make sense.
But the way I was told that the two areconnected was actually by Sean Ellis, who
is the godfather of growth hacking andhe said that all this fancy growth stuff
(01:04):
is nothing but applying the scientificmethod to product and marketing.
So in school, if you were in chem lab andyou did those color changing experiments
with the drops, you know how to dothat and you remember how to do that?
Congratulations.
You know how to do growth.
You try stuff, you see what doesn't work,you use that information to find out what
does work and then you do more of that.
(01:25):
That's growth and growthhacking in a nutshell for you.
it was a completelyaccidental career for me
'cause I had one mad moment thought.
I'd wanted to found a startup,knowing nothing about startups at all.
Including not knowing what marketingmeant, what sales meant, MVP.
I knew none of that 'cause I didn'tcome from this world and started the
(01:47):
journey of learning who to followon Twitter and Sean was one of them.
And September 30th, 2013 was the day mylife changed because of all the thousands
of tweets I could have seen that day.
I see one from Sean that says, launchinga thing called growth hackers.com.
Come check it out.
I click on it and voila, it's acommunity discussing startupy,
things like this is great.
(02:09):
And I start to engage in the communitynot knowing anything even how important
it is for people to engage in a brandnew community that needs traction
and not knowing that it was a smallcommunity and Sean himself was involved.
You are the growth person and youstart to get sort of recognition
(02:31):
by people you look up to andsuddenly this thing becomes a habit.
And a year later, I'm the mostactive member on the community
and get asked to moderate itjust because that's what I was
doing already in my free time.
And a year later was just having arandom conversation with Sean and
basically it was just supposed to be a15 minute catch up and it turned into
(02:52):
an hour and a half long call aboutmaybe why I should be joining the team.
And we have this call,we both sleep on it.
We come back the next day and we'relike, how do you feel about it?
I'm like, great.
So I stumbled into my first startupand first growth gig with the guy
that coined the phrase growth hacking.
But it was all organic.
(03:12):
There was nothing planned about it.
I was just interested in the topic andso I didn't have to fake engagement
or interest but that clearlytranslated into something that worked
and helped the community as well.
So when I joined, it wastransitioning from this passion
project into a full on business.
And that's what really happenedover the next four years.
(03:32):
It became this community that morphedinto everything from events to a book to
online trAIning, a SaaS product and becamean actual revenue generating business.
And there were days I was pinching myself.
I'm like, I can't believeI'm getting pAId to do this.
It was a lot of fun.
And Sean's whole thing was, there isonly one growth hack 'cause he gets asked
the question all the time and I'm sureevery person who does growth gets asked.
(03:56):
What's the magic bullet?
Right?
And there is none
but if there is one, it is yourrate of learning because that's
really all things being equal.
The startup that learns fastest aboutwhat works and doesn't work about
their audience is the one that's gonnaexecute their competition and win.
So was his mandate for us is, I don'tcare what you do, I need you to run
(04:18):
at least three plus tests a week.
And I was there four years.
So do the math.
That was a lot of tests.
At least 158 per year.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
Man, super cool.
But you didn't evenexpect to go into this.
You were just genuinely helping thiscommunity by engaging in the posts and
being as helpful as you could and thatkind of hobby and passion turned into a
job opportunity and more opportunities.
(04:40):
So now you've built some productsonline that are making money.
You mentioned both the book and SaaS.
Are you focused on your ownbusiness or is your business just
helping the other businesses?
Yeah, so since maybe late 2020, early2021, I've been consulting 'cause like
just being in that community openedout a lot of doors for me including
the opportunity to write the bookincluding many other full-time roles
(05:05):
I didn't have to interview for justdoors got opened, people knew me
and got the chance to mentor people.
So at places I never envisioned,like, Harvard Innovation Labs or
Techstars or other accelerators.
And that's when I started to realize thata lot of these questions are the same and
maybe there's something else I could do tomake my dent in the startup failure rate.
(05:27):
Given all the people out there that haveall the experience and knowledge that
people like you, me, and others haveit's kind of stupid that the startup
failure rate is still as high as it is,
Right.
You would think with all the accessto resources and other business owners
who are willing to lend an ear ora little bit of advice, you would
expect the failure rate to be lower.
(05:49):
Exactly.
But it's not right.
And clearly there's nuances there in termsof the demographics that this applies
to that was also part of the reasoningbehind the book was like, here's a way
to scale impact a little bit or go andwork with an accelerator and get to work
with more than one startup at a time.
And the consulting was more my way ofkeeping myself current with what's new
(06:11):
and what's happening, what I can dowith what I'm learning today because
let's face it, given everything that'shappening and now since the last two
years with AI coming into the mix.
I feel obsolete every week.
It's changing so quickly.
It's hard to keep up.
Right.
And I'm constantly trying to find ways andconsulting is just one way to keep myself
(06:32):
on my toes and say, okay, what's thelatest I can learn and bring to the table?
And I raise the odds of success somewhere.
Yes, absolutely.
And I think this is your story isjust a testament to whether you have
experience in a certain field or not.
If you have this always be learningmindset and be willing to be
helpful, you can become an expertin a brand new field and bring a new
(06:52):
perspective and help a lot of people.
And suddenly, like you said,these doors are opening for you.
It's not like you were searching them out.
If you kind of put yourself intothis mindset, suddenly the doors
are gonna open and it's up to youif you wanna walk through them and
you decided, Hey, I'm gonna walkthrough and I'm gonna run with it.
Totally.
And you're absolutely right with you don'thave to have experience thing because I
(07:12):
noticed this when I first got onto GrowthHackers and when that lesson actually
hit me is just by spending all the time Idid in the community for a while actually
became the living brAIn of the community.
I knew everything that was posted.
And so I would see these new discussionshappen and without having gotten my
(07:33):
fingers dirty with anything practicalwith growth, my value add was saying,
Hey, I saw an article two weeks backthat said the same thing or I saw
one that said the exact opposite.
And just that ability to connectdots and say, okay, here's something
complimentary or here's somethingthat's saying the opposite.
So I think is sort of proves yourpoint out that you really don't
have to know much but just immersingyourself in something allows you to
(07:56):
see patterns that other people don't.
That's a great starting point.
Absolutely.
A lot of businesses who aretrying to grow and scale fail.
How do we kind of fix that?
What are they doing wrong and whatshould our attention be focused on?
How much time do we have but I'llgive you the most common things I
see because now clearly most startupsfail before product market fit right?
(08:18):
And there's a lot written about the mostcommon causes of failure or you build
the wrong thing or you build somethingnobody wants and all of those are true,
but what they don't say, I think is thatall of that is a function of learning
the wrong thing at the wrong time.
And that's one big thing isbecause there's an order to things
(08:39):
and there's a context to things.
There'll be some influencer onLinkedIn who will say something
and people will follow that stuff
not realizing that that doesnot apply to their context.
And this is especially true of first timefounders who don't come from this world
but don't know better and then just followwhat some big name says or something
that sounded good or sounded like, oh, ifwe don't do this, we'll be left behind.
(09:03):
So I think, that's a huge piecefor me is just learning the
wrong thing at the wrong time.
And I'll throw out aresource for this as well.
A book I must have recommended to atleast 200 founders is running Lean
by Ash Moria and it's up to its thirdversion right now but that's a great
book and probably the one of the bestbooks I've read for a first time founder
(09:26):
wanting to raise their odds of hittingproduct market fit or learning quickly.
There's nothing there because you learnthe right thing in the right order.
Excellent.
Thank you.
And the second thing which is tied toall of this and relates to something
we spoke about earlier, it is that rateof learning because that doesn't change
no matter what, because you have verylittle money resource at that time and
(09:49):
if you're serious about this, your paceof learning needs to be quick for you
to understand and so one of my favoritequestions and this applies to pre or
post product market teams, is are wesmarter this week than we were last week?
and that doesn't have to bethese earth shattering insights.
It's just we should be doingsomething different or something
(10:11):
more every week because that'show you build momentum on things.
If cannot answer at an individuallevel at least I'm smarter because
I learned what not to do, which isa lot of what you learn is I'm just
shouldn't do any of this anymore.
Great.
But then what else should you do?
So either you learn something that toldyou, do more of it, or you learn something
(10:32):
that says, don't do any more of this.
Do something else.
At the very least, that's what youshould have learned every week.
Apply that construct toeverybody on the team.
That is how a team builds true momentumbecause that is actual learning happening
at a team wide scale, helping and feedingback to the team as to, Hey, this person
learned X, this person learned Y Allof us should be smarter now, not just
(10:55):
you as the CEO or you as the founderdoing the learning while everybody else
does whatever the hell they feel like.
Yes, because they're just kindof running in all different
directions without clarity.
Correct.
Both of these pieces Ithink have to come together.
You have to understand whatis our focus right now.
So you learn the right thing at the righttime and then build momentum towards that
with testing, experimentation, what it is.
(11:17):
So you can be smarter every week.
Yes, absolutely.
And when people are trying to find thatproduct market fit and validate their
product, I see a lot of people failingby spending all their time building
their new SaaS or their new app ortheir new product or service and they
haven't even asked their potentialtarget market, do you want this?
Would you pay money for this?
Is this a need?
Is this gonna solve any of your problems?
(11:38):
And oftentimes they spend so much timetrying to make it fit to an audience
and they end up going back to squareone thinking the product wasn't good
enough when really they maybe justneed to try a different audience.
So it's something with scalableacquisition I think is important as well,
is there's all different channels we cando social media, we can do more organic,
we can do SEO, we can do pAId ads.
(12:00):
Sure it's nice to have a multi-channelapproach and do some experiments
but over time we're gonna get somedata back and we're gonna learn some
channels were not as profitable.
They didn't bring anything in.
How do you kinda look atwhat's working versus not?
What's working versus scaling your growth.
Sure.
Because you've just said the Gword, I'm gonna say something
that's a pet peeve of mine.
(12:20):
Nobody should be growing anythingthat hasn't been validated.
So, like a cat with standing up whenpeople use the growth word before product
market fit cause you're not growinganything, then you're just validating.
Yes.
And this is not a you thing.
This is a me thing.
Right.
So if you're saying growth by definition,you and I are saying it's been validated.
There are signs of product market fitand all product market fit is a test of
(12:43):
retention with a very specific segment.
That's all it is.
So if you have now a bunch of peoplethat keep coming back week after week,
you have to use that information tohelp you grow and I'll come back to
that in a second because the most commonthing I see is, oh, product market fit.
Let's blow this thing up.
Let's run a bunch of ads.
We are gonna go viral on TikTok,TechCrunch, product hunt launches,
(13:05):
whatever and that's absolutelythe wrong approach because none
of those have been validated asapproaches that you should be using
instead what is a better approachis to understand more about.
So the kind of person that finds themost value and you literally ask people
this question, what kind of personwould benefit most from this product?
(13:28):
And see, record how people describethemselves because you might think it's a
social media marketer or a product manageror a lifecycle marketer, or a CEO that
may not be how they describe themselves.
So you want the words and I thinkthis is one of the most underrated
aspects of starting up marketing growthis language that people respond to
(13:50):
language that they feel mirrored in.
Why do we laugh at certain jokes?
It's because it's our sense of humor.
Why do we respond to certainSuper Bowl ads versus not others?
It's literally they'respeaking our language, right?
So language is really important tostart to tease out and I think asking
the question of what kind of persongets to not only the language but
(14:10):
tactically, if you're gonna target people,you're gonna target people like that.
That's how you build your Facebookaudiences or whatever it is.
Don't just randomly say, I'm gonnatarget tech entrepreneurs who are in
their thirties, that's meaningless.
Right and we can't grow or scaleads or any sort of marketing if we
don't understand the audience or whowe're trying to target and especially
if that same audience that we'reassuming is titled themselves a
(14:34):
certain way, they're actually quitedifferent and your targeting would've
been way off and you're not actuallyreaching the right people anymore.
So that's one.
The next thing I wanna ask is, howdo you even find out about us?
And some of these may havebeen personal connections.
Somebody told me, Hey, I saw a poston LinkedIn but if you were to ask
all the people, I'm sure there'll be.
This Pareto that will show upwith at least one or two channels
(14:56):
that are bigger than others.
Guess what?
That's your order of testing channels.
You don't need to do aTikTok and LinkedIn ads.
Or literally follow what people youknow have found you with right now.
And just stick with what works.
Just ask them.
Absolutely.
Cause anybody who spent anytime in this space knows what a
total cluster attribution is soit's like, just forget about it.
(15:18):
Just ask people.
You don't have to be exact about it.
Get trends, double down on those.
So that's second and the thirdquestion I like to ask then is so
what's the primary benefit you found?
Because again, these are peoplewho keep coming back, right?
So clearly they find some benefit in it.
You need to understand what it is,how do they describe the benefit?
Which again, goes back to languagebecause for me, this is the
(15:40):
Holy Trinity of all marketing.
Who do you target with?
What message in what channel?
We nAIled it.
That's the trinity of marketing.
We need those three areas
correct.
And so there's no need to break yourhead or literally ask your people
and ask them to use their words.
There is a pot of gold justwAIting at the end of the rainbow
and we often get distracted.
The answer was here the whole time.
It was right under my nose and wealmost feel stupid for not knowing
(16:03):
or forgetting that like, oh wow.
I do have a list of customers.
I should really solicit theirfeedback to get their thoughts on.
Right.
So now you have something that youhave some learning around that you
can test against 'cause I think peoplewant to move straight into something.
They want to do scale and profitabilityat the same time and you really can't
(16:26):
because again, product market fit bydefinition is its smaller numbers, right?
So what you're trying to doafter that is say, okay, I found
these many people like this.
How many more can I find?
Now it's about scale in terms of purenumbers but it's only if you can get
that working like, okay, now I canrepeatedly get more people and reliably.
So week after week or month after month.
(16:48):
Great.
Now can I do this profitably?
Once I've learned how to get themin the door in the first place
and all of this again goes backto there's an order to things.
Yeah.
And if we're jumping ahead and kind ofmissing steps, this is something within
the buyer's journey they might experiencesome friction or confusion and they
can't quite understand what it is they'rebuying or how it's gonna help them.
(17:08):
So they kind of fall off and you're nevergonna get them to convert and keep them
there that retention is gonna fall off.
I'm glad you mentioned thiscause I hear this all the time.
Found product market fit and ofcourse some VC told them or asked
them about how many users do you have?
How many downloads do you have?
How many signups do you have?
That's the absolute wrong questionbecause acquisition is a solved problem.
(17:29):
There are no secret channels,there's no users on Mars that
only we know about, right?
All the channels are known.
It's just we aren't experts in them.
And my bias is, okay,you are not an expert.
Whatever budget you have, go hire the bestperson you can, freelancer whatever that
lives and breeds that channel for you.
There's no reason for you to wastetime making mistakes that have
(17:51):
already been made and learnings thathave already been learned, right?
Just go hire somebody and solve.
So acquisition is really a solved problem.
What is unique about every productis retention and that's really the
question a VC should be asking.
A startup is not howmany signups do you have?
What is your retention rate over time?
Because that is the businessI want to invest in.
That shows strong retentionat that early stage.
(18:14):
And so the reason I bring this upbecause you said exactly the right
thing, is that if you haven't gottengood learning around the buyer's journey
before you start pouring gas, youmight as well just give me the money.
Why are you wasting it?
I tell founders this all the time,like, gimme a million bucks.
I promise you I will get a millionpeople to show up to your site
tomorrow can't promise you evenone and that is the trick, right?
(18:38):
And so there is this stage after youbelieve you have product market fit and
between really pouring gas on thingswhere you have to set the stage for growth
where you do exactly what youare saying because product market
fit just means I have value.
You have not understood the best wayto deliver this value yet and you
need to figure this bit out right?
(18:58):
So that's everything to do with afirst experience that you put people
through 'cause now you validated theaudience, like, okay, let me put more
of this audience through differentversions of this first experience
because if I put them throughthat experience, let me now see.
What my retention rate looks like overtime and what can I expect as users and
if people stay for this long, maybe Ican get these many users to pay whatever
(19:21):
that amount is, so I start to getsome signal, so now when I pour gas on
everything once I've validated this.
Now I can say, if I get a thousandpeople, I know 40% of them are gonna
hang out for at least one week.
I know that's gonna go down to 20% inweek two but it's gonna stay between 50
and 20% for at least three months after.
Right now I know.
(19:43):
So this is why I think Sean'swords were so resonant with me.
It's all about the scientific method andvalidation and somebody else way smarter
than me said that growth is nothing butretAIning product market fit over time.
And I never thought about it that way.
All too often I see peoplefocusing on trying to get new
leads, the top of the funnel.
They're just like, I just need toget more visibility, more eyes,
(20:04):
more people into the funnel.
And they don't realize what's sittingright there in the middle is the middle
of the funnel where people becomethat customer and they're either gonna
become a non-customer or they're gonnabecome a promoter of your service and
they're gonna become a referral partner.
That is where the money lies, andit's like focus on their experience
that first time user, how do we getthem to stay a bit longer and have
(20:26):
a better experience versus tryingto capture a brand new person.
I don't.
I think most people default to assumingtop of funnel is their problem.
It may be, I'm not discounting it butthe problem is that most people haven't
done the math of their growth and haven'tback engineered that if I need to make
this amount of revenue and this much timeand if my sales cycle is how many ever
(20:49):
months and my average selling prices.
Okay.
Based on that, let me see how wellmy funnel performs and let me make
some estimations about if it performslike this and if I improve it.
Overall by 10% or if I just improve mysign up to engagement conversion rate by
X or my free to pAId conversion or my demoto POC conversion, whatever it may be.
(21:13):
What is the impact of that moving forward?
Because if that is yourproblem, great, who cares?
Your top of funnel is notthe problem right now.
It may become a problem but if youdo all of this math and say, okay,
realistically I can't make somethinghappen in product better and really
there's a top of funnel problem, great.
Now go attack that and now use whatyou've learned about if it is a top
(21:37):
of funnel problem, what channelshave people already found me by?
Let me start there first and solve that.
But again, you've gotta do the math ofgrowth and this is what kind of goes
back to the earlier question you wereasking about why do most startups fail?
I think this is post-product market fit.
If there's a failure, I think it's becausethe math of growth hasn't been done.
(21:58):
Along with all of those other problems ofnot moving fast enough not learning fast
enough, focusing on the wrong areas andI think all of those are functions of not
modeling out your growth because if youdon't model it out, you don't understand
where your biggest choke point is.
And every business has a choke point.
It doesn't matter what else you fix.
If you don't fix that, it's game over.
Right.
And do you find one area tendsto be the most common choke
(22:21):
point for most businesses?
again, for all early startups, Ithink it is that first experience bit.
It's the user activation bit.
Everything flows from there.
Because I know people liketo call it onboarding and
activation and first experience.
All of that is nothing butshort term retention 'cause in
the user's brAIn, I don't thinkthey're thinking about it though.
They're like, am I using it or not?
Am I using it today?
Am I using it tomorrow?
(22:41):
Am I using it three months from now?
So I like to break it up toam I retAIning them short term?
Am I retAIning them medium term?
Am I retAIning them long term?
And all the first experiencestuff I think falls into that.
Absolutely.
Lot of great insight.
As far as trying to validate a productand grow and scale and doing it in the
right order because otherwise we'regonna run into a lot of trouble here.
(23:03):
You mentioned earlier AI and it's beenaround for a few years, arguably much
longer but now it's in a different space.
There's chat, GPT, deepseek, clo, grok, open AI.
AI is being integrated into every app.
Many businesses are trying tointegrate it into their own product.
And you contend that maybe that shouldn'tbe the focus, trying to stuff it into
your product but rather help improvethe efficiencies and operations that
(23:25):
you have running in the backend.
What are some ways that you'reusing AI or you do think other
businesses could use AI as well?
Yeah, I love this question because thisis literally the drum I'm beating this
year and I'm not saying that peopleshouldn't integrate AI into their
product but everybody's doing that.
So that's table stakes and I don'tthink that is a thing that's gonna
transform the trajectory of your companybecause it's sort of like acquisition.
There's no secret AI, like everybody'susing the same foundational models right?
(23:49):
So table stakes there.
What is or can be the differentiator issort of what we touched on earlier, right?
It is speed.
All things being equal, the one thatexecutes faster will win and I've
noticed this in my own work that myown speed of execution has gone up.
My own decision makingability has gone up.
My ability to visualize and try newthings that I might never have thought
(24:11):
about has gone up and when I startto put all of these things into the
context of workflows, that's where Ithink the true power of what moving
really fast means starts to come up.
I'll give you a quick, simple exampleof this from a personal standpoint
which came about talking to somebodyelse is literally building an AI
(24:32):
agent to auto respond to emailsbased on certain keywords and I
don't know how to code, right?
I'm literally using Google Sheets aconnector like make.com or Zapier,
open AI like chat GPT and Gmail.
That's it.
Nothing fancy.
And there's a system that I've almostput into place where I now have a bunch
(24:53):
of keywords in a Google sheet and Ihave a bunch of potential responses
based on those keywords 'cause theseare the kind of emails everybody has,
this is just a small experiment toget some busy work outta the way so
I can do actually stuff that mattersand focus on things that matter.
It's just one simpleto understand example.
Now my system will just look at theemail, it'll automatically generate a
(25:13):
response and put it in a draft readyfor me to approve or change things
around and it'll learn based on that.
And now start to think aboutthis from a business aspect.
How does something like this apply?
Like go back to what we weretalking about, talking to customers.
Everybody does customer research buttends to sit in silos and then you
meet and then you create slides andyou have all sorts of meetings but
imagine that you had a workflow thatwe'd have a call just like this,
(25:37):
there's an author AI transcript, imaginethat gets fed directly into chat GPT.
You can do this today.
Nothing fancy.
Nothing with a prompt that says,okay, analyze these, this conversation
or here's a hundred conversations.
Analyze all of these for patternson competitive intel or product
satisfaction or buying intentor whatever it is you want.
(25:59):
Prioritize this for me in orderof which one will help me sell
for the most or fastest or who totarget or whatever you want, right?
And now without additional work, itgenerated these insights from me.
I can use that to kickoff a whole new workflow.
This is great.
Now generate 20 experiments for me,each for a landing page Google ad
(26:22):
and email sequence all around thesame topic and give me 20 ideas for
things I can test in all of this.
this is like half an hour in whichall of this will happen versus
imagine what's gonna happen intoday's world or in yesterday's world.
This is weeks and months of work.
It is.
And I think there's a lotof analysis paralysis.
I had it too.
(26:42):
I still have it because of the noiseevery week but I'm just trying to simplify
stuff and say I'm just gonna use a fewtools and see how far I can take it.
I'm not gonna get distracted bythe noise of everything else.
See what I'm doing today that I canmove faster with just three, four
tools and everything centralizedaround a chat GPT or a clot on
(27:03):
everyday things I can use cheap.
I'm still on a free plan of make.com.
You don't need an enterprise accountto be able to make these APIs and AI
agents systems talk to each other.
Totally.
It's huge.
I love using AI and I'm a big fanof using it in workflows as well.
The AI generated responses,it can extract keywords and
information from the message body.
(27:25):
It can interpret that data andit can put it into certain fields
and suddenly it's crafting thispersonalized response at scale.
So usually that would take five to 10minutes to craft, even 30 minutes to
really do a nice follow up email that'spersonalized AI, like you said, it can
find the transcript from the video.
It can interpret and analyze it,it can produce something else.
I did an entire year's worth ofsocial media content through chat GPT
(27:48):
because I asked it I need in columnA, I need, a date from now until the
end of the year and a time in thisformat, and it gave me 50 of 'em.
I said, I need post titles.
I need this and it createdthis Excel sheet for me.
All I had to do was take that over tomy social media schedule and upload
it but this is just one of like,probably 20 processes I have with
like some sort of AI or automationthat just helps improve workflows.
(28:11):
It's a game changer and it'shelping a lot of solopreneurs get
access to these tools that the bigbox companies only had access to.
Totally.
But I think what's implicit in what yousaid, which I think is maybe part of why
some people at least are not finding asmuch success is an ability to ask good
questions and good follow ups 'cause thatmany times, that initial output isn't
(28:33):
really great and you need to massageit into something 'cause sometimes it
sounds good in theory but it's nevergonna work or it'll use words that
like, no, humans don't talk like that.
They don't behave like that.
Right?
So the point I'm getting at is,for people who don't know how to ask
good questions, I think to me thatis a better skill to learn, right now
(28:56):
'cause the output is the output, right?
The output is commoditized now.
I think it's the input that is moreimportant and I believe at least one
reason why maybe I can ask a betterquestion than some people is because
of actual experience doing the thing.
So I understand what I'm askingfor and I have a lot of context
behind what I'm asking for.
So I can see how this might bedifficult for newer people trying to
(29:20):
do something 'cause there's just noactual experience but that doesn't
mean you can't go get that experienceand just try some of that stuff.
Like if you're already trying toolsand blah, blah, on this side, spend
some time learning how to test becauseeven constructing a good hypothesis
is an exercise in asking a good questionbecause the output is binary and when
(29:41):
you don't get a binary output or you geta fuzzy response, it's a signal to you
that I didn't ask the question well, Ididn't formulate the hypothesis well.
So I think if we all learn to getbetter at hypothesis, not saying
I'm the best at it, I too haveto learn and get better at it.
But I feel like that is the kernel ofit all is even things we choose to do
on a day-to-day basis at work don'tthink of it as a thing I'm doing, think
(30:02):
of it through the lens of a hypothesis.
Like, why am I doing this?
So if I do expect to see Y, I'll measureit through Z. And I think reframing
that lens allows us to get better atasking questions, which then feeds
us better into prompts and the like.
Absolutely.
Now where can people find out more aboutyou and get connected with you online?
(30:23):
So I hang out on LinkedIn all the time.
I still hang out on X as well.
So both places are absolutely fine.
I will talk to anybody who wantsto nerd out about this stuff.
And we'll have those linksavAIlable down in the show notes
and the description for everybody.
Anuj, our last final question here isanything we haven't talked about today
that you would want to share as a pieceof advice to any starting entrepreneurs
(30:46):
or people who are kind of struggling,spinning their wheels right now?
What's the one thing you wantthem to take home with them?
Get yourself to the spot whereyou can say, I am smarter this
week than I was last week.
I promise you, it's a game changerwhen you can do this week after week
and if you get to this for four, sixweeks in a row, start asking yourself
(31:07):
that question every five days.
And if you do that six to eightweeks in a row, start asking
yourself every three days.
I promise you, you won'tbelieve how fast you're moving.
Like you won't recognizeyourself in six months.
I love it.
If we can be more activejust put ourselves out there.
Always be learning, trying to takein new information and be a helpful
resource in a lot of communities.
(31:28):
A lot of that is gonna lead intoour success and ultimately, leading
us to make better decisions.
Anuj, we appreciate your timeand sharing all your wisdom, tips
and tricks with us for growthhacking and just business scaling.
We appreciate it.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
This a lot of fun.
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