November 4, 2025 • 41 mins
🟪 Join 500+ Smart Entrepreneurs ➤ https://www.gabemarusca.com and learn each week for free, how to stop chasing leads, serve clients longer & enjoy freedom doing what you love, without burning out or breaking down.
In this episode, I chat with Anthony Pierri, co-founder of FletchPMM, a product marketing consultancy working with B2B tech startups.
Anthony explains why hiding your prices wastes everyone's time and how transparency actually increases revenue over the long run.
With over 400 venture-backed clients and $1.5M annual revenue at 60% margins, he shares the productization framework that changed everything.We discuss why custom consulting never scales, how to pick one specific thing to own in customers' minds, and the reality of building credibility.
Anthony breaks down the three-month minimum investment for content to work and why outcomes don't stick but functional workflows do.
We explore how AI startups can stand out by finding smaller ponds to dominate instead of competing on the word "AI" itself.
Join us as we talk through practical positioning strategies, the innovator's dilemma for small businesses, and choosing your business model wisely.
🟪 Timestamps
(00:00) Introducing Anthony Pierri
(01:39) The Importance of Showing Prices Upfront
(07:58) Productizing Your Business for Efficiency
(14:31) Balancing Productization and Retainer Work
(20:00) Specializing and Positioning for Success
(23:26) Building Credibility and Personal Brand
(28:20) Challenges and Strategies for AI Startups
(35:27) Opportunities for Startups in Smaller Markets
(39:26) Connect with Anthony Pierri
🟪 Connect with Anthony Pierri
- Website: https://www.fletchpmm.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonypierri/
🟪 Connect with Gabe Marusca
- Website: https://www.gabemarusca.com
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@gabemarusca
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabemarusca/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gabemarusca/
- X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gabemarusca
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maruscagabe/
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gabemarusca
Until Next Week,
Pura Vida!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Any company that wants to have aplace in customers brains, any
chance of having word of mouth needs to pick something specific
at a functional level that theirproduct does.
Andre Pieri is the Co founder ofFledge, PMMA product marketing
consultancy that helps B2B tech startups discover their ideal
product positioning and bring itto life on a newly crafted
(00:21):
homepage. Becoming productized potentially
can open up the door a lot more because you become so much more
referable. Since Fletch started, Antony and
his part in Rob Kaminsky have worked with over 400 venture
backed start-ups. We do about a million and a half
a year in revenue at probably around 60% margin or so.
(00:41):
In today's episode, we dive intothe nitty gritty of positioning,
how to stand out by actually showing your prices publicly,
and how productizing your business and being super
specific can help you not only grow, but save you a lot of
headache and time. You have to find an underserved
group of people and say I'm going to go build a business
there. And the only weapon that
(01:03):
startups have against the big companies is that they can focus
on these smaller market opportunities that a big company
just doesn't care to go after. Before we start, I'm Gabe
Marushka and I would like to thank you for listening to the
episodes and trying to learn something that you can apply in
your business right away. If you enjoy it and you find it
helpful, it would mean the worldto me if you can subscribe and
(01:24):
leave a comment down below in order to support the show.
Thank you so much and enjoy. Andrew.
Welcome to 13 the Wild. Great to be here.
Thanks so much for having me. My pleasure and I'll dive
straight into it. You're very vocal about showing
prices upfront. Why?
(01:45):
Yeah, that's, I mean, it dependsif you're talking about
consultancies or product companies.
I think for both, I am usually aproponent of showing it.
I have probably stronger opinions on the consultancy side
that I think it just makes you very difficult to buy when
people have no idea what price range you're even in.
(02:06):
So for us, we're like, we want to have the right fit people be
reaching out to us at a consistent cadence.
And so part of that is knowing that they would be OK paying
what we charge. And so we think putting prices
front and center makes a really big difference on that.
And we actually went as far to put the pricing of our service
(02:28):
in the first scroll of the website.
So, you know, the website hero, we have the prices even in
there, which is pretty much unheard of in consulting worlds.
And we posted about it on LinkedIn.
We challenged other consultants and service providers and
agencies to do the same. And a bunch of people did.
And we just think it goes a longway in creating transparency and
(02:49):
it makes it so you don't waste their time for people who go
through your whole sales processwho could have never afforded
you and vice versa, right? It doesn't waste your time that
you're having to meet with all these different people and pitch
people who don't actually want to buy the service or couldn't
buy the service. So for us, it's been a big
improvement. People who get on the calls
already know what we charge and are OK with paying it usually.
(03:10):
And they're trying to decide if this is a good fit or not.
But the price is not an element that they're worried about at
that point because they've already mentally prepared for
it. And I think the pushback of
people who want to keep it hidden is they think, well, I
could probably squeeze some moremoney out of folks if I can feel
out how much they're willing to pay for my service.
Maybe I could pitch a bigger price.
But we think whatever additionalmoney you get from doing it that
(03:33):
way, you will lose in the long run because you will miss out on
so many clients, waste so much time, your sales process gets so
bogged down. So we think the trade off you
at, we think you end up making more money by showing it and and
having standard pricing. And there's ways to do it where
you can still have tiers, right.Like we do a version of the
value based pricing, which is wewill price clients differently
(03:56):
depending on how big they are. But we're very upfront about it.
We say if you're a early stage company and you want to work
with us and you're making less than a million a year, we're not
going to charge you the same amount as a company that works
with us. That's a Fortune 500 that is
making many, many billions or something like that.
It doesn't make sense to us. The complexity of the bigger
company is going to be a lot higher.
The potential impact and value from a revenue perspective will
(04:18):
be a lot higher. So we will price higher.
And so you could be open and transparent about this.
It doesn't have to be some sort of secretive thing you do behind
the scenes where it's like, well, no, I'm trying to price
the client, but I don't want anyone to know what I charge
this person. No, you can still do it in a
public facing way. And what's the best practice
around it like to put something like pressing starting at or
(04:38):
engagement starting at and the based on that depending on the
level of engagement that you have with the particular
clients, so you charge accordingly or how you approach
it. Yeah, I think you hit the nail
on the head, right. There's a consulting, or you
could call them an agency calledRefine Labs.
There's a guy named Chris Walker.
He's big on LinkedIn. I saw him doing this like years
ago, right? And they're a big high ticket
(05:00):
agency that works with massive companies, huge, huge expensive
contracts, something like 20 KA month, I can't remember.
But it's like people have to be spending a lot of money to work
with them. And so they've had public
pricing for years, right? Starting at blank and it just
puts you in the ballpark. And then I think you can figure
out, OK, what is this getting customized at all or not and
adjust it from there. But give people a reference
(05:23):
point, right? Like if it's, if you're going to
charge 20 KA month, don't hide that and be like, oh, it's some
amount of money because you willget people who would never in a
million years dream of paying, you know, 20 KA month wasting
time on your sales folks, right?That they have to meet with
these people, figure out, oh, isthis person qualified?
You spend so much time and energy just for that tiny little
(05:45):
extra money you could potentially squeeze out of
people. Just doesn't feel like it's
worth it. Yeah.
And another argument people bring when they don't show their
pricing is the fact that, oh, I'm not maybe confident enough
to charge my words and I want toprovide so much value in the
Zoom call, discovery call, whatever you call it in order
(06:08):
for them to understand why I'm charging this much, how you will
address that? Yeah.
I mean, there's two places whereyou can prove that you're going
to provide value. 1 is in the sales process and 1 is long
before someone ever books a callwith you through your LinkedIn
posts, your content, your thought leadership.
(06:29):
We just think it should happen there because if you have to do
it all during the sales process,it's not the most conducive
environment to be proving that you can provide value because
you're in an active sales negotiation.
That's just not a great place toinstill trust and all that stuff
because you like they know you're trying to sell them.
So for us, we're like, we do everything out in the open.
(06:49):
We share our frameworks publicly.
We share exactly what we're going to do on the sessions.
All the deliverables are clearlyspelled out on our homepage.
You can look at them. They're real examples from real
companies. We have long videos walking
through exactly how the process works, what you get.
We have tons of testimonials. We have about 100 before and
after case studies with the companies, all sorts of
(07:10):
different industries. So we try to just front load
share as much of it as possible so that by the time someone
books a call, they're kind of already bought in.
We don't need to convince them in that moment.
But most people don't do it thatway.
They are custom consultants who work with anyone and so they
can't really do that. They have to keep it open and
(07:32):
broad by nature. So they can really only get
people from their network to come and work with them.
And the problem with people fromyour network is, again, they
don't know much about you. They don't know what you do.
So you do have to do a lot of itin the sales process, which is
just not great. So we always think you can
create that trust other places. And then by the time they reach
your website to get on the call with you, you could just be very
(07:53):
honest. Yep, here it is, exactly what it
looks like and people can decideif they want it or not.
Absolutely. And from what you're sharing,
it's basically you need to have a level of productization in
your offer, otherwise it's so hard to like create custom
solution for every single personthat knocks on your door.
How much of what you do is basedon frameworks and how much it's
(08:15):
cost them? We do essentially all
productized. So we have we have basically no
custom offers at all and we really only have one offer.
So we do a two week Sprint with our clients that is focused on
helping them figure out their product positioning.
That's all during week 1. And then the second week is
translating that positioning strategy into a rewritten
homepage. So it's basically the same with
(08:36):
every client. We've done it about 500 times
and we just slowly have been increasing prices over time to
get more money out of it. We're bringing in more people to
help run these sprints. And so it's much easier in our
opinion to scale it that way in a healthy way, right?
Because when you do everything custom, the way that you scale
is you land a bigger client. You have to hire people to
(08:57):
service the client. It's this never ending treadmill
because when that client ends, you got to find another client
equally as big who needs all those people.
But since it was custom, they likely will need people with
different expertise than the first group, right?
Because if you're doing, let's say website designer or you
know, app development or something like that, great.
So you got all these developers who know this specific language
(09:18):
for this big project. Can you find another person who
needs that same mix of developers with their skill
sets? Maybe, maybe not.
So it gets worse as you scale with the custom agencies because
everything is always different. And so people end up going on
the bench. There's a lot of margin that you
lose. You have to hire more middle
managers for people to just coordinate, like account manager
(09:40):
type stuff too. So for us, we're like, if we can
keep the offer really, really simple, the same every time,
that helps make it easy to buy, easy to sell, easy to refer,
easy to scale. And for us, over time, we get so
much more efficient at it because it's the same, but we
also get better outcomes for theclient because we're getting
(10:01):
better and better and better at what we do from all the wraps.
So the time we spend per projectmight actually go down overtime,
but the value we're providing isgoing up and we could charge
more. So the more we do, the higher
the margin gets, which is very, very different than most people
in the agency world. Yeah, I wish I knew this when I
started because I started as graphic designer, then web
(10:24):
designer, then kind of play agency before switching to
consulting and focus on prototyping my offering.
And I know that through this process I face some roadblocks.
And one of them was the fact that, wait, if I just have this
quote UN quote small offer just fixing this small problem, how
(10:45):
can I ever be fully booked or how can I ever not chase clients
all the time? If someone is still there in
that situation, how will you advise them to go about it?
Yeah, it's really funny because it's it's sort of a chicken and
the egg problem in some ways. You've, you've hit the nail on
the head. You need more clients if you're
(11:06):
going to do a productized business.
But I will caveat that you it's all related to your own personal
goals, right? If you want to make let's say
$150,000 a year and you're selling let's say a $10,000
productized offer, you need 15 clients in a year.
That might feel like a lot, especially if you're someone
(11:26):
who's like, well, I came from a retainer world.
I had four big clients that eachpay me X amount of money, you
know, per month. These are different types of
businesses. The productized 1, you really
are running a business. It's not a consultant like a
freelancer kind of like it almost like when you have three
big clients who pay your retainer, it's closer to just
(11:48):
having three-part time jobs, which is like that's fine.
If you want to do that, you wantto have three bosses, 3 part
time jobs, OK, go good for you, right?
But if you want to make a business that you're not
beholden to anyone, that there'sno client who can demand
anything of you because you're like you're 1 of of many, If I
lose you as a client, so be it. You could say no to people, all
(12:12):
that stuff. You do have to solve the
distribution problem. Now The funny thing is, like I
was saying, it's the chicken andthe egg is when people coming
from the retainer side, they think it's so hard to get
clients because I just have to network like crazy.
But becoming productized potentially can open up the door
a lot more because you become somuch more referable.
(12:35):
But at the same time, it also creates A flywheel for you to
share content expertise about what you're actually providing.
So for us, our big content flywheel is running the same
type of Sprint with every singlecompany and having all these
learnings and then translating those learnings into LinkedIn
posts where we can deliver valueat a really consistent clip.
(12:59):
So you probably will have to do some form of thought leadership.
Well, whether it's podcast appearances or writing a book or
whatever, but the, the fact thatyou are productized gives you
the ammo to be able to actually do that.
Where a custom consultant, you can't really do thought
leadership much because what arethey going to write about?
It's always different. It's every single client would
care about different things. You can't get any sense of
(13:22):
repeatability in the content or the types of topics you're
writing about because it's always going to be different.
So if you can hone it on an areaand start sharing the insights,
like there's a guy named Drew McClellan.
He had this podcast called Building a Better Agency and he
had this quote that was so simple, but very, very profound.
He said, if you want to sell an expertise, like if you want to
(13:44):
have an expertise based business, you have to publicly
demonstrate that you have the expertise.
And so I was like, oh, that's soobvious, but you don't think
about it that way because every consultants like, well, I don't
want to share any of my stuff, right?
That's my secret sauce. But then no one's going to know
that you're trustworthy. So if you focus in, if you
productize, if you pick a niche,that creates a way to create
content. But again, someone, whether it's
(14:06):
you or someone you hire, needs to be able to consistently put
out content to be able to get more clients to fill this whole
thing. So they work together.
But you can't discount it that you probably will need to do
some type of content and figure out how to get good results from
that. And if there is a way to get the
best from both worlds, best fromthe productization side and best
(14:29):
from retention, I think I found the solution since I'm doing
exactly that. Like I have a handful of clients
that I have a retainer with, butmy offer is productize.
Basically we go 3 stages, acquisition, retention,
operations. And in each one, we have
frameworks and standardized approaches and so on, but they
(14:51):
stay with us for longer. And in the same time, we kind of
sold the big three problems the business usually have.
And the same time, there are some indeed moving pieces
because especially when it comesto acquisition, some have
different approaches, some use alot of building a personal brand
and some others have different approaches.
And based on their skills and their expertise, we try to work
(15:14):
implement what works best for them.
How you'll see that like since indeed I still have some
problems where like I maybe needto hire a contractor for that or
finding different approaches based on their strengths and
weaknesses and so on, especiallyaround the acquisition.
After that, it's quite easy retention and operations, but
(15:35):
especially around acquisition, Ipersonally face this challenge
and others that are having this approach face as well.
It's possible to productize acquisition entirely or?
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think productization is a
sliding scale of how productizedsomething really is, right?
So to give you an example, our Sprint is 2 weeks.
(15:57):
It lasts 2 weeks. It has four live calls.
There are three of them. The first one is always on
Monday. The second one is always on
Wednesday. The 3rd 1 is always on Thursday.
They're each 75 minutes in length.
There are very specific things we do on those 375 minute calls.
The prep looks the same for every client going in.
Like we have a set audit processthat we do for every single
(16:19):
client takes about roughly the same time for us internally when
So we meet with them on Monday, on Tuesday they meet as a team
to make a strategic decision that then powers the rest of the
week. Then we meet again Wednesday and
Thursday. Then we take everything back on
Friday and Monday of the following week.
We'll then translate those things into a homepage
wireframe. We have a whole system for that.
(16:39):
And then we share this live on Tuesday of the following week.
And then between Tuesday and Friday at 5:00 PM Central time,
we're doing a sync revisions with the client on the homepage
wireframe. So that right there is the whole
Sprint. So to me, that's like the far
end of productized where you have every single part is
exactly mapped out with the amount of time with exactly what
(17:00):
the agenda will be, what you're going to do.
It's a true program, right? If AI was good enough, we could
probably turn it into software. So when you describe those 3
phases, to me that feels significantly less productized,
all things being equal compared to like, it's these three exact
sessions with this exact deliverables and these exact
steps. So for that, I think it makes
(17:20):
more sense what you're saying about adding on these additional
retainer stuff. But for us with our business
model, if I take one of our employees and say, OK, you run
these two and we have two slots each week, we have morning slots
and we have afternoon slots for these sprints.
So our one position consultant, her name Sarah, we would love
for her to be fully booked out two sessions per week, maybe 6
(17:41):
per month and have like one month or one week off or we can
like do catch up of different things.
So I need her booked with six companies, let's say per month
in the morning slot, in the afternoon slot.
If she takes a retainer, she cannot do that anymore.
So the whole system breaks down because it is so repeatable,
productized week by week and we're working with so many
(18:02):
clients that any retainer work, it would have to be done by
someone else. We'd have to hire someone
specific to handle retainer workand whatever that might look
like. Same thing with me and my Co
founder Rob. We run these sprints the same
way. If we take a retainer, we're
basically saying no to much higher margin projects that are
happening every single week. So the retainer makes sense if
(18:25):
you think about it as two separate business lines.
You've got the productized business and then you're
retainer, which is a separate business.
So we've talked about starting that separate business, hiring
more people and being the retainer team.
That's like, great, once you've done the product, I Sprint with
one of these people who run, that's all they do.
Then we're going to hand you offto the separate team of people
and they're going to do retainerwork with you.
So I think you can do that. But most consultancies,
(18:48):
especially the smaller ones, don't really have the bandwidth
to run 2 separate businesses. So for us, we've prioritized the
one specific business first. We want to see how big we can
get it. If we start hitting some sort of
growth walls and we need to expand, I think we'll revisit
the conversation. But we keep, we keep like I was
saying before we keep raising prices.
We do about a million and a halfa year in revenue at probably
(19:11):
around 60% margin or so. So it is a nice lucrative
business for our really small team and it becomes more and
more efficient over time. And each time that we increase
prices, obviously that gets higher and we haven't hit that
growth wall yet. So I think that's how I would
think about those two separate ideas, if that makes sense.
Yeah, perfect sense. And some of those incidents that
(19:33):
share I applied and I think I need just need to work on some
of the other things that I stillneed to customize the approach
that I have and hire external people to help and so on.
But you mentioned a couple of time positioning and I know
pricing, it's part of it, but what else people need to look
(19:55):
into when they really want to stand out?
Yeah, I think there's a guy named David C Baker.
He runs his own firm that basically just does positioning
for service providers and agencies and consultants.
He's he has a podcast called 2 Bobs.
It's really, really good and they have a lot of really good
context about this. So I would I would tell anyone
(20:17):
to check that out. But if you think about it, you
want to be specialized in a way that people would shop for a
specific thing that you do. And so when people say I do
growth, I don't know what that means, right?
And so most companies are not shopping for growth.
They are saying, do you know anyone who does LinkedIn ads or
(20:38):
do you know anyone who does coldoutbound?
Or do you know anyone who can help me write my newsletter?
So positioning for those specific use cases or categories
of service providers, that's kind of step one like you need
to be in a bucket. So for us, we do positioning and
there are many positioning experts out there.
So once you put yourself in a category, you probably also want
(21:00):
to pick some sort of segment that you want to to specifically
hone in on. Because if I say we do
positioning and that's it, there's all sorts of people who
want positioning who are not a good fit for us.
We don't really do great work with B to C companies.
We don't really do great work with like if you're AD to C
direct to consumer product. It's not really our space for
us. We found our framework is really
(21:22):
built for B to B software companies, usually ones that are
selling enterprise software and usually with sales and marketing
teams as the way to get new customers.
So saying we do positioning for B to B software companies
etcetera, all those different things.
That's the next step, right. So you have a category for a
specific group of people. Now you're already a lot smaller
(21:43):
pool. If I'm AB to B person, I'm
looking for someone to do positioning.
I've just shrunk it to a smallerpool of people.
And then what makes us different, You have to have some
level of differentiation within the other people in that same
category. So for us, it's things like the
fact that we are flat rate pricing, totally productized and
we've linked it with this homepage deliverable, which a
(22:04):
lot of people don't do. Most of the positioning experts
are just selling strategy decks.That's it.
You just get a deck and then yougot to figure out what to do
with it. There's a really big position
consultant that we look up to name April Dunford.
She, if you think about us within the space of positioning
experts, she charges I think 80 grand for three days.
We don't charge that much. We're significantly cheaper.
(22:26):
So in some ways, she is the moreexpensive option, we're the more
budget option and she more focuses on the sales narrative
of what is the people going to say in the sales call.
We focus more on the home page. So we've created some
differentiation so that we don'tcompete with her at all.
Like we don't, like, I don't think we've had a single sales
call out of 500 companies we worked with where they're like,
(22:47):
we're trying to decide between you and April because it's never
happened. So what you want to do is you
want to be very specialized for a specific group of people and
have some sort of interesting angle, some sort of point of
view differentiation that makes you stand out within that group.
And then ideally you've been sharing this POV and your
expertise for a long time to thespecific people you're trying to
(23:08):
reach. Like all of our content is
geared towards B to B software companies.
So if people have been followingus, we've created credibility
over time. And then we kind of if they find
themselves in that time where they're like, we want to refresh
the homepage, want to work on our positioning, make sure it
makes sense. We're kind of the only name that
comes up as an option. And on that note, usually how
(23:29):
long does it take to build that credibility is often the the
this part of building a personalbrand to putting yourself out
there and build that trust over time.
It's something that puts a lot of people off from various
reasons, from fears, anything believes and so on.
And still it's probably one of the best way, if not the best
way to to build trust for you. How long did it take to build
(23:52):
this powerful brand that you have now?
We were posting for probably nine months before we got a
single client. And that was partially because
we didn't even know we wanted tosell.
So we knew we wanted to sell something.
We knew we don't want it to be productized.
We knew we wanted to be flat rate.
We knew we wanted to have a veryspecific deliverable.
We had kind of the the flavours,the idea, but we didn't know
(24:16):
exactly what it was going to be.So we just started posting to
find out what would people be interested in.
So we did some posts about pricing models that maybe we
could do pricing consulting of some kind.
We did posts about sales decks or we did posts about all sorts
of stuff that we thought about. One, one point I took a sales
call with the guy around building a community because it
was like it was a community management thing where maybe
(24:36):
we'll do that. So we had all these different
ideas. We're trying it and we basically
stumbled into this positioning in home pages concept.
And then once we start getting alittle traction there, so from
social media right on LinkedIn, then we're like, we should
probably lean into that, start posting more about that.
And again, it was like 9 months before we got clients.
Now it won't take that long if you pick sooner.
(24:57):
So like my, my brother, his nameis Vince.
He comes from a very different background, not in tech.
And he saw what I was doing and he was like, man, maybe I should
start posting on LinkedIn and see if I can get a side hustle
business. And he picked the things from
day one. He was like, I want to do public
speaking coaching for B to B software companies.
(25:17):
And so he started posting about public speaking coaching.
And I think he got his first client significantly faster
probably in the first two or three months.
So you can shrink that amount oftime if you're willing to just
pick something sooner. We didn't know what we wanted to
pick. It took us longer.
So we're kind of fumbling aroundfor a lot of time.
But I would say if you have an idea and you think, OK, this is
(25:37):
what I want to sell and this thegroup I want to sell to, I would
think at minimum it takes a quarter.
It's probably a three month investment before you will see
anything. But again, you have to be
posting things that are super valuable and are both valuable
and demonstrating your expertise.
So like the early stuff that we would post was auditing people's
websites for free. We would just take someone's
website, we'd make a cool post diagnosing it, why it was
(26:00):
working, why it wasn't working from a positioning perspective.
And then we would post those andthen we tagged the company, we
tagged the founder. Sometimes they'd be mad,
sometimes they'd be happy. Sometimes we'd take four
companies in the same category, put all their home pages right
next to each other and be like, look, none of them look
different than each other. These people need to figure out
how to differentiate. And then the sometimes the
companies would be mad, sometimes we'd get clients from
it. People would be like, oh, I'm
(26:20):
one of those four companies. I want to look different, what
should I do? So stuff like that, I think it's
like where you can find publiclyauditable assets and then post
about it, right? We have a, another guy that we
partner with a lot named Yakov and he does PLG onboarding.
So he will take people's onboarding flows and diagnose
why they're working or not working and then and then post
about it again. It's like if you want to sell
onboarding flow optimization, it's pretty simple.
(26:44):
What kind of content you need todo, You need to show people you
know how to optimize the onboarding flow, right?
So that's why I'm saying about like the specialization, the
productization makes the contenteasy because you're like, that's
what I'm gonna post about. I need to prove people that I
can do this thing. What kind of insights can I
share about it? And my, my brother who was
posting about public speaking coaching, would like breakdown
how to write a talk. He'd be like this.
(27:04):
What the beginning point should talk about.
He would take a diagnose other people's talks.
He would, you know, respond to how people are writing things
and would give all sorts of helpful suggestions and all
sorts of frameworks. And now he is doing is doing
really well. He's getting a lot of clients
and he actually just left his full time gig and he's going to
now do this full time his own his own business, like kind of
how we spun off to do our own aswell.
(27:26):
So that's kind of the thought behind it.
It's. Very good when you hear it.
But if I roll back the time and I was like, but I can serve all
these people, why should I go sofocused and so on.
And for all the reason that you mentioned, it makes so much
sense because indeed, if you, ifyou're known for certain,
(27:46):
certain thing, it's easier to position yourself to create
content, to build authority and so on.
And still I see a lot of people like being so broad.
And for example, I have a approach in which I focus or I,
if you want niche down or resultthat I bring rather than a
specific industry or a specific segment.
(28:06):
And that at least work very wellfor me.
But in the same time, I see people have different approaches
and so on. So I like to see if someone that
is listening to us and let's sayit's in the start up world and
let's be even more specific, they are in AI and it's so much
competition, so much hype aroundit and and so on.
(28:26):
How they can truly stand out it in that world where people are
just sharing all the time about Oh my God, I just built this,
this, that solved that problem and that problem.
But oh, there are twenty others that are doing the same thing
and and so on. And especially in a fast-paced
world like AI, maybe they don't have a couple of months to to
(28:50):
build that trust and and so on before they're probably startup
failed. Yeah.
How would they approach that? Yeah.
So if you're a startup, I think if you don't have a couple
months, I think you're probably doomed, right.
If you if you don't have three months to try to build by
buying, like I think you're all it's over.
You know, this, this whole thing's done.
(29:10):
A lot of these AI startups raisemoney so they have longer
runway. So that's one model, right?
And then bootstrapping model, it's a different thought, right?
Where where's the money going tocome from?
A lot of people will start agencies and then eventually
launch software out of the agency, right?
And the agency is funding it. So there's going to be a period
of time where you're unprofitable no matter what.
That's just sort of the the nature of software.
(29:31):
So in general, it comes down to just the basic fact of how will
people remember you? You want to be remembered.
You want to get a spot in people's brains.
I've done this exercise with other people, and we'll see if
you give the same answers. If I ask you, what does Stripe
do? What would you say if you had to
(29:52):
say like a word or two? Payment.
Payments Are you familiar with the company Gong?
No. OK.
Or let's think of another sales force.
Yes, what do they do? Sales pipelines?
Yeah, or like CRM, but a lot of people will say right there,
right, you just said payments for Stripe.
(30:17):
Stripe occupies that part in your brain.
So anyone time, anyone says I need a way to do payments,
there's a company you can associate with payments in your
brain. So you go, oh, Stripe does that.
Maybe you should check out Stripe.
Or you know, I need to figure out the sales pipeline thing.
Oh, I should think of Salesforce.
So specific places in people's brains that they can associate
with you, with you right now. If I say what company do you
(30:41):
think of when I think when I sayAI, probably most people would
say open AI, right? ChatGPT, maybe they'd say
Claude. So any new startup, probably not
going to win the AI word, right?Stripe has won the payments
word. People think of them as the
payments company. Open AI, Entropic, they kind of
(31:04):
have the leading edge on AI. If I said vibe coding, you would
think of lovable, you would think of maybe Bolt.
So what you're trying to do is find very specific things to
own. What you will have noticed when
you use the example you said I was positioning myself more on
an outcome that I drove. I didn't say any outcomes with
(31:27):
any of those companies. And when I said this, when I
said what a Stripe do, you did not say they increase your
revenue, you said payments, right.
And I said what does sales, sales force do?
You did not say get you more business, you said sales
pipeline, right. So usually we are associating
these companies with functional things with what they do, not an
(31:49):
outcome they drive. So any company that wants to
have a place in a, in customers brains, any chance of having
word of mouth needs to pick something specific at a
functional level that their product does.
So you know, there's a lot of AIplatforms and the only way they
get remembered is if they have something specific you can
associate. I think of Lovable as the vibe
(32:11):
coding platform, right? I think of Sierra as the
customer experience AI agent stuff.
I think of Finn from from Intercom, right, as AI agents
for customer service. There's specific things I can
associate from a functional level.
So anyone who's in the AI space needs to say, what's the
functional workflow that I'm going to support that people
(32:34):
then can think of me for in the same way that every single other
B to B business has something functional that people associate
with them. It's the only chance you have.
And so you have to find what where is there white space from
a functional perspective that then they can go win.
Or if they get crazy funding, they can go try to take over one
of the big ones, right? Which is sort of like, you know,
(32:55):
The Who is that? What's the, the AI search
company perplexity? They're like, we're going to
take over search. We're going after Google, right?
They have tons of funding. And so they're like, we want to
be the search company. And so they're going to go after
them and try to and try to beat Google at search.
That's a strategy, right? But you have to be associated
with something and it's not going to be an outcome.
(33:18):
It's going to be a functional workflow.
True. And if you wonder if oh, but
this space is already taken whenit comes to Stripe, they weren't
the first ones. There were many others before
them. And one glorious one, if you
want it, it's people. And still they overthrow it.
And now people is playing catch up.
And yeah, and that's the thing. And I would like to ask you like
(33:40):
once you identify that functionality, like how you
build that authority around it. Yes, often you hear this advice
and I I wonder if you think it'sthe right approach to get one
idea and to write about it in 1000 ways that still works in
into today's world or? It comes, I think from a
(34:04):
consulting perspective, it can. But again, it comes down to
competition, right? If you pick something like,
let's say you're like, I want when people think of me, I want
to, I want to be thought of whenpeople say sales, oh, that's
sales that's owned by this person.
Like it's such a big broad category.
You're not going to win it. I could write about sales 1000
(34:28):
different ways. I'm not going to become the
salesperson who's like the expert on sales.
So you have to probably shrink it down, right?
Like Stripe is not the expert onmoney.
It's specifically payments processing is what they really
want, right? So and with us, we are not the
experts of marketing, right? That would be someone like, I
(34:51):
don't know, Seth Godin, New YorkTimes best selling author,
right? With 1015 different books that
are like with the number one marketing books, great, I'm not
going to be able to compete withthat.
I could be the industry expert in B to B SAS startup product
positioning as it relates to thehomepage.
(35:13):
You know, I could probably be the top expert in that and you
know, you can look at certain metrics and like me and my Co
founder, if you when you narrow it down to that, we really are
kind of the main experts to that.
And so the same thing with startups, you have to think
about what competition exists and if you can compete in that.
And if you cannot compete in that, you need to find an
(35:34):
underserved segment that you could win, right?
So it goes back to like a lot ofthe early stuff from like the
early 2000s, like Lean startup and, and all these things have
kind of fallen out of favor. I think it was right.
I think it's still right. Like you have to find an
underserved group of people and say, I'm going to go build a
business there. And the, the only weapon that
(35:55):
startups have against the big companies is that they can focus
on these smaller market opportunities that a big company
just doesn't care to go after, right?
There was a whole book called the Innovator's Dilemma, which
is basically talking about how giant companies will not pursue
these small opportunities because they're just too small.
(36:16):
And it was like, you know, if you want, if you want to be, if
you're Apple and you're like, OK, how are we going to move the
needle or, I don't know, 2 trillion or whatever the however
big their market cap is, they'renot going to move the needle
from pursuing some small opportunity that's only worth 50
million. They have to like make a car or
like become a bank or something crazy where it's like, you know,
this have to be like massive bets we're making where any
(36:39):
little person like you or me making a $50 million idea is
like, that's amazing. So Apple's not going to go and
make this $50 million business. Maybe I could, because there's a
$50 million market that is mad that this thing doesn't exist
and none of the big people will make it.
So that's the only weapon started startups have unless
(37:02):
they can get infinite funding, right?
Unless you're Sam Altman or ElonMusk and you can go around and
raise billions and billions of dollars, then OK, sure, then you
can compete on the global stage against the big incumbents.
But for the rest of us, the onlything we can do is find smaller
markets to start with. And then the whole book of the
innovators film The thing is like, you can pursue these weird
small markets that then could theoretically become massive
(37:25):
markets. So like, why didn't Chase Bank
create Stripe? Because this whole weird corner
of the Internet of payments processing just didn't feel like
it was worth it. Now Stripe is worth what, 100
billion or something? Now the big companies are
looking to be like, shoot, we should have done this or any of
the car companies with Tesla, right?
It was like, I don't want to do electric cars.
(37:47):
Like nobody wants that. Elon's like I think there's a
market there, goes and builds itand then every company's playing
catch up be like, oh, shoot, we should, we should have done it.
So that's like the innovator's dilemma.
That's the only weapon that we have as small fish in big ponds
is to find smaller ponds. And the big question is how do
you find those ponds? Because it's often the hardest
(38:08):
thing, I guess. Yeah.
And that's where you you have tobe steeped in some sort of world
to find opportunities, right? Like that's why some of the best
startups are vertical SAS, right, Or vertical software
people who were in an industry and have seen that the industry
is lacking this type of softwareand then making software for it.
(38:28):
So, you know, they work in, I don't know, HVAC or something
for 20 years and they're like, man, this is terrible that
they're this thing doesn't exist.
We see this problem every day. What if we could just build it
and we could probably sell it toall the other people in our
industry? So that type of stuff is always
great. Like we think vertical software
has a really strong advantage inthe future, but like you have to
be steeped in somewhere and thenthat becomes kind of just a, a
(38:49):
facet of entrepreneurship. If you're someone who's I don't
want to come up with something new and some new idea, it's a
great go be an accountant. You know, you don't have to come
up with a new business. You can have a nice life, Pick
one of the existing career paths.
If you want to come up with something new, make a new
business that's kind of just part of the deal.
A. 100% And I think that's kind of the beauty of it as well,
(39:10):
because you're always in this creative state in which you try
to innovate, try to find new, new ways of doing things.
And it's also the reason why youdon't get bored in this this
path of entrepreneurship. And personally, that's why I
love it for those that are watching or listening right now
and there isn't a lot about you,but you share where they can get
(39:32):
in touch with you in order to work with you guys.
Yeah, I would say you could always start with our Linkedins,
follow us for a little bit, follow along with our content.
And then, you know, if, if that feels like, OK, I kind of agree
with them from a point of view perspective.
And it feels like you need help with positioning and you'd want
to go beyond that. Then I would say just our
website, it's a good spot to do it.
(39:52):
And you know, see if we practicewhat we preach, see if you can
understand what we do very clearly on our website and who
we're for and all that type of stuff.
Those answers are not clear to you then don't work with us,
right. But you know, we try to be the
the clearest out there of, of what we do and who we're for.
But yeah, usually I would say start with our content because I
think that's a good filter because some people are like,
oh, I don't agree with any of this stuff.
(40:12):
And it's like, great, don't, don't work with us.
Then that's a great point and make sure you guys watching this
thing that the links are down below.
And I want to conclude with something.
If you still remember to tell us, what was your positioning
with you guys already decide when you want, who you want to
(40:33):
serve and how much that change. Yeah, to today.
At the very beginning it was so broad.
I think we said we help foundersmarket hard to market products,
which like cool phrase, what does that mean, right?
What a founder of what type of startup, how big, how small,
(40:54):
what type of products, what can,what constitutes a hard to
market product? What does market mean, right?
Are we writing ads? Are we making campaigns, you
know, running stuff like that. So it was very broad and then
now it's much, much more narrow,right?
And we've just basically really honed in on the exact specific
service, a lot of stuff that we've talked about already.
(41:15):
This is Anthony Pieri on Authority in the World.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Any company that wants to have aplace in customers brains, any
chance of having word of mouth needs to pick something specific
at a functional level that theirproduct does.
Andre Pieri is the Co founder ofFledge, PMMA product marketing
consultancy that helps B2B tech startups discover their ideal
product positioning and bring itto life on a newly crafted
(00:21):
homepage. Becoming productized potentially
can open up the door a lot more because you become so much more
referable. Since Fletch started, Antony and
his part in Rob Kaminsky have worked with over 400 venture
backed start-ups. We do about a million and a half
a year in revenue at probably around 60% margin or so.
(00:41):
In today's episode, we dive intothe nitty gritty of positioning,
how to stand out by actually showing your prices publicly,
and how productizing your business and being super
specific can help you not only grow, but save you a lot of
headache and time. You have to find an underserved
group of people and say I'm going to go build a business
there. And the only weapon that
(01:03):
startups have against the big companies is that they can focus
on these smaller market opportunities that a big company
just doesn't care to go after. Before we start, I'm Gabe
Marushka and I would like to thank you for listening to the
episodes and trying to learn something that you can apply in
your business right away. If you enjoy it and you find it
helpful, it would mean the worldto me if you can subscribe and
(01:24):
leave a comment down below in order to support the show.
Thank you so much and enjoy. Andrew.
Welcome to 13 the Wild. Great to be here.
Thanks so much for having me. My pleasure and I'll dive
straight into it. You're very vocal about showing
prices upfront. Why?
(01:45):
Yeah, that's, I mean, it dependsif you're talking about
consultancies or product companies.
I think for both, I am usually aproponent of showing it.
I have probably stronger opinions on the consultancy side
that I think it just makes you very difficult to buy when
people have no idea what price range you're even in.
(02:06):
So for us, we're like, we want to have the right fit people be
reaching out to us at a consistent cadence.
And so part of that is knowing that they would be OK paying
what we charge. And so we think putting prices
front and center makes a really big difference on that.
And we actually went as far to put the pricing of our service
(02:28):
in the first scroll of the website.
So, you know, the website hero, we have the prices even in
there, which is pretty much unheard of in consulting worlds.
And we posted about it on LinkedIn.
We challenged other consultants and service providers and
agencies to do the same. And a bunch of people did.
And we just think it goes a longway in creating transparency and
(02:49):
it makes it so you don't waste their time for people who go
through your whole sales processwho could have never afforded
you and vice versa, right? It doesn't waste your time that
you're having to meet with all these different people and pitch
people who don't actually want to buy the service or couldn't
buy the service. So for us, it's been a big
improvement. People who get on the calls
already know what we charge and are OK with paying it usually.
(03:10):
And they're trying to decide if this is a good fit or not.
But the price is not an element that they're worried about at
that point because they've already mentally prepared for
it. And I think the pushback of
people who want to keep it hidden is they think, well, I
could probably squeeze some moremoney out of folks if I can feel
out how much they're willing to pay for my service.
Maybe I could pitch a bigger price.
But we think whatever additionalmoney you get from doing it that
(03:33):
way, you will lose in the long run because you will miss out on
so many clients, waste so much time, your sales process gets so
bogged down. So we think the trade off you
at, we think you end up making more money by showing it and and
having standard pricing. And there's ways to do it where
you can still have tiers, right.Like we do a version of the
value based pricing, which is wewill price clients differently
(03:56):
depending on how big they are. But we're very upfront about it.
We say if you're a early stage company and you want to work
with us and you're making less than a million a year, we're not
going to charge you the same amount as a company that works
with us. That's a Fortune 500 that is
making many, many billions or something like that.
It doesn't make sense to us. The complexity of the bigger
company is going to be a lot higher.
The potential impact and value from a revenue perspective will
(04:18):
be a lot higher. So we will price higher.
And so you could be open and transparent about this.
It doesn't have to be some sort of secretive thing you do behind
the scenes where it's like, well, no, I'm trying to price
the client, but I don't want anyone to know what I charge
this person. No, you can still do it in a
public facing way. And what's the best practice
around it like to put something like pressing starting at or
(04:38):
engagement starting at and the based on that depending on the
level of engagement that you have with the particular
clients, so you charge accordingly or how you approach
it. Yeah, I think you hit the nail
on the head, right. There's a consulting, or you
could call them an agency calledRefine Labs.
There's a guy named Chris Walker.
He's big on LinkedIn. I saw him doing this like years
ago, right? And they're a big high ticket
(05:00):
agency that works with massive companies, huge, huge expensive
contracts, something like 20 KA month, I can't remember.
But it's like people have to be spending a lot of money to work
with them. And so they've had public
pricing for years, right? Starting at blank and it just
puts you in the ballpark. And then I think you can figure
out, OK, what is this getting customized at all or not and
adjust it from there. But give people a reference
(05:23):
point, right? Like if it's, if you're going to
charge 20 KA month, don't hide that and be like, oh, it's some
amount of money because you willget people who would never in a
million years dream of paying, you know, 20 KA month wasting
time on your sales folks, right?That they have to meet with
these people, figure out, oh, isthis person qualified?
You spend so much time and energy just for that tiny little
(05:45):
extra money you could potentially squeeze out of
people. Just doesn't feel like it's
worth it. Yeah.
And another argument people bring when they don't show their
pricing is the fact that, oh, I'm not maybe confident enough
to charge my words and I want toprovide so much value in the
Zoom call, discovery call, whatever you call it in order
(06:08):
for them to understand why I'm charging this much, how you will
address that? Yeah.
I mean, there's two places whereyou can prove that you're going
to provide value. 1 is in the sales process and 1 is long
before someone ever books a callwith you through your LinkedIn
posts, your content, your thought leadership.
(06:29):
We just think it should happen there because if you have to do
it all during the sales process,it's not the most conducive
environment to be proving that you can provide value because
you're in an active sales negotiation.
That's just not a great place toinstill trust and all that stuff
because you like they know you're trying to sell them.
So for us, we're like, we do everything out in the open.
(06:49):
We share our frameworks publicly.
We share exactly what we're going to do on the sessions.
All the deliverables are clearlyspelled out on our homepage.
You can look at them. They're real examples from real
companies. We have long videos walking
through exactly how the process works, what you get.
We have tons of testimonials. We have about 100 before and
after case studies with the companies, all sorts of
(07:10):
different industries. So we try to just front load
share as much of it as possible so that by the time someone
books a call, they're kind of already bought in.
We don't need to convince them in that moment.
But most people don't do it thatway.
They are custom consultants who work with anyone and so they
can't really do that. They have to keep it open and
(07:32):
broad by nature. So they can really only get
people from their network to come and work with them.
And the problem with people fromyour network is, again, they
don't know much about you. They don't know what you do.
So you do have to do a lot of itin the sales process, which is
just not great. So we always think you can
create that trust other places. And then by the time they reach
your website to get on the call with you, you could just be very
(07:53):
honest. Yep, here it is, exactly what it
looks like and people can decideif they want it or not.
Absolutely. And from what you're sharing,
it's basically you need to have a level of productization in
your offer, otherwise it's so hard to like create custom
solution for every single personthat knocks on your door.
How much of what you do is basedon frameworks and how much it's
(08:15):
cost them? We do essentially all
productized. So we have we have basically no
custom offers at all and we really only have one offer.
So we do a two week Sprint with our clients that is focused on
helping them figure out their product positioning.
That's all during week 1. And then the second week is
translating that positioning strategy into a rewritten
homepage. So it's basically the same with
(08:36):
every client. We've done it about 500 times
and we just slowly have been increasing prices over time to
get more money out of it. We're bringing in more people to
help run these sprints. And so it's much easier in our
opinion to scale it that way in a healthy way, right?
Because when you do everything custom, the way that you scale
is you land a bigger client. You have to hire people to
(08:57):
service the client. It's this never ending treadmill
because when that client ends, you got to find another client
equally as big who needs all those people.
But since it was custom, they likely will need people with
different expertise than the first group, right?
Because if you're doing, let's say website designer or you
know, app development or something like that, great.
So you got all these developers who know this specific language
(09:18):
for this big project. Can you find another person who
needs that same mix of developers with their skill
sets? Maybe, maybe not.
So it gets worse as you scale with the custom agencies because
everything is always different. And so people end up going on
the bench. There's a lot of margin that you
lose. You have to hire more middle
managers for people to just coordinate, like account manager
(09:40):
type stuff too. So for us, we're like, if we can
keep the offer really, really simple, the same every time,
that helps make it easy to buy, easy to sell, easy to refer,
easy to scale. And for us, over time, we get so
much more efficient at it because it's the same, but we
also get better outcomes for theclient because we're getting
(10:01):
better and better and better at what we do from all the wraps.
So the time we spend per projectmight actually go down overtime,
but the value we're providing isgoing up and we could charge
more. So the more we do, the higher
the margin gets, which is very, very different than most people
in the agency world. Yeah, I wish I knew this when I
started because I started as graphic designer, then web
(10:24):
designer, then kind of play agency before switching to
consulting and focus on prototyping my offering.
And I know that through this process I face some roadblocks.
And one of them was the fact that, wait, if I just have this
quote UN quote small offer just fixing this small problem, how
(10:45):
can I ever be fully booked or how can I ever not chase clients
all the time? If someone is still there in
that situation, how will you advise them to go about it?
Yeah, it's really funny because it's it's sort of a chicken and
the egg problem in some ways. You've, you've hit the nail on
the head. You need more clients if you're
(11:06):
going to do a productized business.
But I will caveat that you it's all related to your own personal
goals, right? If you want to make let's say
$150,000 a year and you're selling let's say a $10,000
productized offer, you need 15 clients in a year.
That might feel like a lot, especially if you're someone
(11:26):
who's like, well, I came from a retainer world.
I had four big clients that eachpay me X amount of money, you
know, per month. These are different types of
businesses. The productized 1, you really
are running a business. It's not a consultant like a
freelancer kind of like it almost like when you have three
big clients who pay your retainer, it's closer to just
(11:48):
having three-part time jobs, which is like that's fine.
If you want to do that, you wantto have three bosses, 3 part
time jobs, OK, go good for you, right?
But if you want to make a business that you're not
beholden to anyone, that there'sno client who can demand
anything of you because you're like you're 1 of of many, If I
lose you as a client, so be it. You could say no to people, all
(12:12):
that stuff. You do have to solve the
distribution problem. Now The funny thing is, like I
was saying, it's the chicken andthe egg is when people coming
from the retainer side, they think it's so hard to get
clients because I just have to network like crazy.
But becoming productized potentially can open up the door
a lot more because you become somuch more referable.
(12:35):
But at the same time, it also creates A flywheel for you to
share content expertise about what you're actually providing.
So for us, our big content flywheel is running the same
type of Sprint with every singlecompany and having all these
learnings and then translating those learnings into LinkedIn
posts where we can deliver valueat a really consistent clip.
(12:59):
So you probably will have to do some form of thought leadership.
Well, whether it's podcast appearances or writing a book or
whatever, but the, the fact thatyou are productized gives you
the ammo to be able to actually do that.
Where a custom consultant, you can't really do thought
leadership much because what arethey going to write about?
It's always different. It's every single client would
care about different things. You can't get any sense of
(13:22):
repeatability in the content or the types of topics you're
writing about because it's always going to be different.
So if you can hone it on an areaand start sharing the insights,
like there's a guy named Drew McClellan.
He had this podcast called Building a Better Agency and he
had this quote that was so simple, but very, very profound.
He said, if you want to sell an expertise, like if you want to
(13:44):
have an expertise based business, you have to publicly
demonstrate that you have the expertise.
And so I was like, oh, that's soobvious, but you don't think
about it that way because every consultants like, well, I don't
want to share any of my stuff, right?
That's my secret sauce. But then no one's going to know
that you're trustworthy. So if you focus in, if you
productize, if you pick a niche,that creates a way to create
content. But again, someone, whether it's
(14:06):
you or someone you hire, needs to be able to consistently put
out content to be able to get more clients to fill this whole
thing. So they work together.
But you can't discount it that you probably will need to do
some type of content and figure out how to get good results from
that. And if there is a way to get the
best from both worlds, best fromthe productization side and best
(14:29):
from retention, I think I found the solution since I'm doing
exactly that. Like I have a handful of clients
that I have a retainer with, butmy offer is productize.
Basically we go 3 stages, acquisition, retention,
operations. And in each one, we have
frameworks and standardized approaches and so on, but they
(14:51):
stay with us for longer. And in the same time, we kind of
sold the big three problems the business usually have.
And the same time, there are some indeed moving pieces
because especially when it comesto acquisition, some have
different approaches, some use alot of building a personal brand
and some others have different approaches.
And based on their skills and their expertise, we try to work
(15:14):
implement what works best for them.
How you'll see that like since indeed I still have some
problems where like I maybe needto hire a contractor for that or
finding different approaches based on their strengths and
weaknesses and so on, especiallyaround the acquisition.
After that, it's quite easy retention and operations, but
(15:35):
especially around acquisition, Ipersonally face this challenge
and others that are having this approach face as well.
It's possible to productize acquisition entirely or?
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think productization is a
sliding scale of how productizedsomething really is, right?
So to give you an example, our Sprint is 2 weeks.
(15:57):
It lasts 2 weeks. It has four live calls.
There are three of them. The first one is always on
Monday. The second one is always on
Wednesday. The 3rd 1 is always on Thursday.
They're each 75 minutes in length.
There are very specific things we do on those 375 minute calls.
The prep looks the same for every client going in.
Like we have a set audit processthat we do for every single
(16:19):
client takes about roughly the same time for us internally when
So we meet with them on Monday, on Tuesday they meet as a team
to make a strategic decision that then powers the rest of the
week. Then we meet again Wednesday and
Thursday. Then we take everything back on
Friday and Monday of the following week.
We'll then translate those things into a homepage
wireframe. We have a whole system for that.
(16:39):
And then we share this live on Tuesday of the following week.
And then between Tuesday and Friday at 5:00 PM Central time,
we're doing a sync revisions with the client on the homepage
wireframe. So that right there is the whole
Sprint. So to me, that's like the far
end of productized where you have every single part is
exactly mapped out with the amount of time with exactly what
(17:00):
the agenda will be, what you're going to do.
It's a true program, right? If AI was good enough, we could
probably turn it into software. So when you describe those 3
phases, to me that feels significantly less productized,
all things being equal compared to like, it's these three exact
sessions with this exact deliverables and these exact
steps. So for that, I think it makes
(17:20):
more sense what you're saying about adding on these additional
retainer stuff. But for us with our business
model, if I take one of our employees and say, OK, you run
these two and we have two slots each week, we have morning slots
and we have afternoon slots for these sprints.
So our one position consultant, her name Sarah, we would love
for her to be fully booked out two sessions per week, maybe 6
(17:41):
per month and have like one month or one week off or we can
like do catch up of different things.
So I need her booked with six companies, let's say per month
in the morning slot, in the afternoon slot.
If she takes a retainer, she cannot do that anymore.
So the whole system breaks down because it is so repeatable,
productized week by week and we're working with so many
(18:02):
clients that any retainer work, it would have to be done by
someone else. We'd have to hire someone
specific to handle retainer workand whatever that might look
like. Same thing with me and my Co
founder Rob. We run these sprints the same
way. If we take a retainer, we're
basically saying no to much higher margin projects that are
happening every single week. So the retainer makes sense if
(18:25):
you think about it as two separate business lines.
You've got the productized business and then you're
retainer, which is a separate business.
So we've talked about starting that separate business, hiring
more people and being the retainer team.
That's like, great, once you've done the product, I Sprint with
one of these people who run, that's all they do.
Then we're going to hand you offto the separate team of people
and they're going to do retainerwork with you.
So I think you can do that. But most consultancies,
(18:48):
especially the smaller ones, don't really have the bandwidth
to run 2 separate businesses. So for us, we've prioritized the
one specific business first. We want to see how big we can
get it. If we start hitting some sort of
growth walls and we need to expand, I think we'll revisit
the conversation. But we keep, we keep like I was
saying before we keep raising prices.
We do about a million and a halfa year in revenue at probably
(19:11):
around 60% margin or so. So it is a nice lucrative
business for our really small team and it becomes more and
more efficient over time. And each time that we increase
prices, obviously that gets higher and we haven't hit that
growth wall yet. So I think that's how I would
think about those two separate ideas, if that makes sense.
Yeah, perfect sense. And some of those incidents that
(19:33):
share I applied and I think I need just need to work on some
of the other things that I stillneed to customize the approach
that I have and hire external people to help and so on.
But you mentioned a couple of time positioning and I know
pricing, it's part of it, but what else people need to look
(19:55):
into when they really want to stand out?
Yeah, I think there's a guy named David C Baker.
He runs his own firm that basically just does positioning
for service providers and agencies and consultants.
He's he has a podcast called 2 Bobs.
It's really, really good and they have a lot of really good
context about this. So I would I would tell anyone
(20:17):
to check that out. But if you think about it, you
want to be specialized in a way that people would shop for a
specific thing that you do. And so when people say I do
growth, I don't know what that means, right?
And so most companies are not shopping for growth.
They are saying, do you know anyone who does LinkedIn ads or
(20:38):
do you know anyone who does coldoutbound?
Or do you know anyone who can help me write my newsletter?
So positioning for those specific use cases or categories
of service providers, that's kind of step one like you need
to be in a bucket. So for us, we do positioning and
there are many positioning experts out there.
So once you put yourself in a category, you probably also want
(21:00):
to pick some sort of segment that you want to to specifically
hone in on. Because if I say we do
positioning and that's it, there's all sorts of people who
want positioning who are not a good fit for us.
We don't really do great work with B to C companies.
We don't really do great work with like if you're AD to C
direct to consumer product. It's not really our space for
us. We found our framework is really
(21:22):
built for B to B software companies, usually ones that are
selling enterprise software and usually with sales and marketing
teams as the way to get new customers.
So saying we do positioning for B to B software companies
etcetera, all those different things.
That's the next step, right. So you have a category for a
specific group of people. Now you're already a lot smaller
(21:43):
pool. If I'm AB to B person, I'm
looking for someone to do positioning.
I've just shrunk it to a smallerpool of people.
And then what makes us different, You have to have some
level of differentiation within the other people in that same
category. So for us, it's things like the
fact that we are flat rate pricing, totally productized and
we've linked it with this homepage deliverable, which a
(22:04):
lot of people don't do. Most of the positioning experts
are just selling strategy decks.That's it.
You just get a deck and then yougot to figure out what to do
with it. There's a really big position
consultant that we look up to name April Dunford.
She, if you think about us within the space of positioning
experts, she charges I think 80 grand for three days.
We don't charge that much. We're significantly cheaper.
(22:26):
So in some ways, she is the moreexpensive option, we're the more
budget option and she more focuses on the sales narrative
of what is the people going to say in the sales call.
We focus more on the home page. So we've created some
differentiation so that we don'tcompete with her at all.
Like we don't, like, I don't think we've had a single sales
call out of 500 companies we worked with where they're like,
(22:47):
we're trying to decide between you and April because it's never
happened. So what you want to do is you
want to be very specialized for a specific group of people and
have some sort of interesting angle, some sort of point of
view differentiation that makes you stand out within that group.
And then ideally you've been sharing this POV and your
expertise for a long time to thespecific people you're trying to
(23:08):
reach. Like all of our content is
geared towards B to B software companies.
So if people have been followingus, we've created credibility
over time. And then we kind of if they find
themselves in that time where they're like, we want to refresh
the homepage, want to work on our positioning, make sure it
makes sense. We're kind of the only name that
comes up as an option. And on that note, usually how
(23:29):
long does it take to build that credibility is often the the
this part of building a personalbrand to putting yourself out
there and build that trust over time.
It's something that puts a lot of people off from various
reasons, from fears, anything believes and so on.
And still it's probably one of the best way, if not the best
way to to build trust for you. How long did it take to build
(23:52):
this powerful brand that you have now?
We were posting for probably nine months before we got a
single client. And that was partially because
we didn't even know we wanted tosell.
So we knew we wanted to sell something.
We knew we don't want it to be productized.
We knew we wanted to be flat rate.
We knew we wanted to have a veryspecific deliverable.
We had kind of the the flavours,the idea, but we didn't know
(24:16):
exactly what it was going to be.So we just started posting to
find out what would people be interested in.
So we did some posts about pricing models that maybe we
could do pricing consulting of some kind.
We did posts about sales decks or we did posts about all sorts
of stuff that we thought about. One, one point I took a sales
call with the guy around building a community because it
was like it was a community management thing where maybe
(24:36):
we'll do that. So we had all these different
ideas. We're trying it and we basically
stumbled into this positioning in home pages concept.
And then once we start getting alittle traction there, so from
social media right on LinkedIn, then we're like, we should
probably lean into that, start posting more about that.
And again, it was like 9 months before we got clients.
Now it won't take that long if you pick sooner.
(24:57):
So like my, my brother, his nameis Vince.
He comes from a very different background, not in tech.
And he saw what I was doing and he was like, man, maybe I should
start posting on LinkedIn and see if I can get a side hustle
business. And he picked the things from
day one. He was like, I want to do public
speaking coaching for B to B software companies.
(25:17):
And so he started posting about public speaking coaching.
And I think he got his first client significantly faster
probably in the first two or three months.
So you can shrink that amount oftime if you're willing to just
pick something sooner. We didn't know what we wanted to
pick. It took us longer.
So we're kind of fumbling aroundfor a lot of time.
But I would say if you have an idea and you think, OK, this is
(25:37):
what I want to sell and this thegroup I want to sell to, I would
think at minimum it takes a quarter.
It's probably a three month investment before you will see
anything. But again, you have to be
posting things that are super valuable and are both valuable
and demonstrating your expertise.
So like the early stuff that we would post was auditing people's
websites for free. We would just take someone's
website, we'd make a cool post diagnosing it, why it was
(26:00):
working, why it wasn't working from a positioning perspective.
And then we would post those andthen we tagged the company, we
tagged the founder. Sometimes they'd be mad,
sometimes they'd be happy. Sometimes we'd take four
companies in the same category, put all their home pages right
next to each other and be like, look, none of them look
different than each other. These people need to figure out
how to differentiate. And then the sometimes the
companies would be mad, sometimes we'd get clients from
it. People would be like, oh, I'm
(26:20):
one of those four companies. I want to look different, what
should I do? So stuff like that, I think it's
like where you can find publiclyauditable assets and then post
about it, right? We have a, another guy that we
partner with a lot named Yakov and he does PLG onboarding.
So he will take people's onboarding flows and diagnose
why they're working or not working and then and then post
about it again. It's like if you want to sell
onboarding flow optimization, it's pretty simple.
(26:44):
What kind of content you need todo, You need to show people you
know how to optimize the onboarding flow, right?
So that's why I'm saying about like the specialization, the
productization makes the contenteasy because you're like, that's
what I'm gonna post about. I need to prove people that I
can do this thing. What kind of insights can I
share about it? And my, my brother who was
posting about public speaking coaching, would like breakdown
how to write a talk. He'd be like this.
(27:04):
What the beginning point should talk about.
He would take a diagnose other people's talks.
He would, you know, respond to how people are writing things
and would give all sorts of helpful suggestions and all
sorts of frameworks. And now he is doing is doing
really well. He's getting a lot of clients
and he actually just left his full time gig and he's going to
now do this full time his own his own business, like kind of
how we spun off to do our own aswell.
(27:26):
So that's kind of the thought behind it.
It's. Very good when you hear it.
But if I roll back the time and I was like, but I can serve all
these people, why should I go sofocused and so on.
And for all the reason that you mentioned, it makes so much
sense because indeed, if you, ifyou're known for certain,
(27:46):
certain thing, it's easier to position yourself to create
content, to build authority and so on.
And still I see a lot of people like being so broad.
And for example, I have a approach in which I focus or I,
if you want niche down or resultthat I bring rather than a
specific industry or a specific segment.
(28:06):
And that at least work very wellfor me.
But in the same time, I see people have different approaches
and so on. So I like to see if someone that
is listening to us and let's sayit's in the start up world and
let's be even more specific, they are in AI and it's so much
competition, so much hype aroundit and and so on.
(28:26):
How they can truly stand out it in that world where people are
just sharing all the time about Oh my God, I just built this,
this, that solved that problem and that problem.
But oh, there are twenty others that are doing the same thing
and and so on. And especially in a fast-paced
world like AI, maybe they don't have a couple of months to to
(28:50):
build that trust and and so on before they're probably startup
failed. Yeah.
How would they approach that? Yeah.
So if you're a startup, I think if you don't have a couple
months, I think you're probably doomed, right.
If you if you don't have three months to try to build by
buying, like I think you're all it's over.
You know, this, this whole thing's done.
(29:10):
A lot of these AI startups raisemoney so they have longer
runway. So that's one model, right?
And then bootstrapping model, it's a different thought, right?
Where where's the money going tocome from?
A lot of people will start agencies and then eventually
launch software out of the agency, right?
And the agency is funding it. So there's going to be a period
of time where you're unprofitable no matter what.
That's just sort of the the nature of software.
(29:31):
So in general, it comes down to just the basic fact of how will
people remember you? You want to be remembered.
You want to get a spot in people's brains.
I've done this exercise with other people, and we'll see if
you give the same answers. If I ask you, what does Stripe
do? What would you say if you had to
(29:52):
say like a word or two? Payment.
Payments Are you familiar with the company Gong?
No. OK.
Or let's think of another sales force.
Yes, what do they do? Sales pipelines?
Yeah, or like CRM, but a lot of people will say right there,
right, you just said payments for Stripe.
(30:17):
Stripe occupies that part in your brain.
So anyone time, anyone says I need a way to do payments,
there's a company you can associate with payments in your
brain. So you go, oh, Stripe does that.
Maybe you should check out Stripe.
Or you know, I need to figure out the sales pipeline thing.
Oh, I should think of Salesforce.
So specific places in people's brains that they can associate
with you, with you right now. If I say what company do you
(30:41):
think of when I think when I sayAI, probably most people would
say open AI, right? ChatGPT, maybe they'd say
Claude. So any new startup, probably not
going to win the AI word, right?Stripe has won the payments
word. People think of them as the
payments company. Open AI, Entropic, they kind of
(31:04):
have the leading edge on AI. If I said vibe coding, you would
think of lovable, you would think of maybe Bolt.
So what you're trying to do is find very specific things to
own. What you will have noticed when
you use the example you said I was positioning myself more on
an outcome that I drove. I didn't say any outcomes with
(31:27):
any of those companies. And when I said this, when I
said what a Stripe do, you did not say they increase your
revenue, you said payments, right.
And I said what does sales, sales force do?
You did not say get you more business, you said sales
pipeline, right. So usually we are associating
these companies with functional things with what they do, not an
(31:49):
outcome they drive. So any company that wants to
have a place in a, in customers brains, any chance of having
word of mouth needs to pick something specific at a
functional level that their product does.
So you know, there's a lot of AIplatforms and the only way they
get remembered is if they have something specific you can
associate. I think of Lovable as the vibe
(32:11):
coding platform, right? I think of Sierra as the
customer experience AI agent stuff.
I think of Finn from from Intercom, right, as AI agents
for customer service. There's specific things I can
associate from a functional level.
So anyone who's in the AI space needs to say, what's the
functional workflow that I'm going to support that people
(32:34):
then can think of me for in the same way that every single other
B to B business has something functional that people associate
with them. It's the only chance you have.
And so you have to find what where is there white space from
a functional perspective that then they can go win.
Or if they get crazy funding, they can go try to take over one
of the big ones, right? Which is sort of like, you know,
(32:55):
The Who is that? What's the, the AI search
company perplexity? They're like, we're going to
take over search. We're going after Google, right?
They have tons of funding. And so they're like, we want to
be the search company. And so they're going to go after
them and try to and try to beat Google at search.
That's a strategy, right? But you have to be associated
with something and it's not going to be an outcome.
(33:18):
It's going to be a functional workflow.
True. And if you wonder if oh, but
this space is already taken whenit comes to Stripe, they weren't
the first ones. There were many others before
them. And one glorious one, if you
want it, it's people. And still they overthrow it.
And now people is playing catch up.
And yeah, and that's the thing. And I would like to ask you like
(33:40):
once you identify that functionality, like how you
build that authority around it. Yes, often you hear this advice
and I I wonder if you think it'sthe right approach to get one
idea and to write about it in 1000 ways that still works in
into today's world or? It comes, I think from a
(34:04):
consulting perspective, it can. But again, it comes down to
competition, right? If you pick something like,
let's say you're like, I want when people think of me, I want
to, I want to be thought of whenpeople say sales, oh, that's
sales that's owned by this person.
Like it's such a big broad category.
You're not going to win it. I could write about sales 1000
(34:28):
different ways. I'm not going to become the
salesperson who's like the expert on sales.
So you have to probably shrink it down, right?
Like Stripe is not the expert onmoney.
It's specifically payments processing is what they really
want, right? So and with us, we are not the
experts of marketing, right? That would be someone like, I
(34:51):
don't know, Seth Godin, New YorkTimes best selling author,
right? With 1015 different books that
are like with the number one marketing books, great, I'm not
going to be able to compete withthat.
I could be the industry expert in B to B SAS startup product
positioning as it relates to thehomepage.
(35:13):
You know, I could probably be the top expert in that and you
know, you can look at certain metrics and like me and my Co
founder, if you when you narrow it down to that, we really are
kind of the main experts to that.
And so the same thing with startups, you have to think
about what competition exists and if you can compete in that.
And if you cannot compete in that, you need to find an
(35:34):
underserved segment that you could win, right?
So it goes back to like a lot ofthe early stuff from like the
early 2000s, like Lean startup and, and all these things have
kind of fallen out of favor. I think it was right.
I think it's still right. Like you have to find an
underserved group of people and say, I'm going to go build a
business there. And the, the only weapon that
(35:55):
startups have against the big companies is that they can focus
on these smaller market opportunities that a big company
just doesn't care to go after, right?
There was a whole book called the Innovator's Dilemma, which
is basically talking about how giant companies will not pursue
these small opportunities because they're just too small.
(36:16):
And it was like, you know, if you want, if you want to be, if
you're Apple and you're like, OK, how are we going to move the
needle or, I don't know, 2 trillion or whatever the however
big their market cap is, they'renot going to move the needle
from pursuing some small opportunity that's only worth 50
million. They have to like make a car or
like become a bank or something crazy where it's like, you know,
this have to be like massive bets we're making where any
(36:39):
little person like you or me making a $50 million idea is
like, that's amazing. So Apple's not going to go and
make this $50 million business. Maybe I could, because there's a
$50 million market that is mad that this thing doesn't exist
and none of the big people will make it.
So that's the only weapon started startups have unless
(37:02):
they can get infinite funding, right?
Unless you're Sam Altman or ElonMusk and you can go around and
raise billions and billions of dollars, then OK, sure, then you
can compete on the global stage against the big incumbents.
But for the rest of us, the onlything we can do is find smaller
markets to start with. And then the whole book of the
innovators film The thing is like, you can pursue these weird
small markets that then could theoretically become massive
(37:25):
markets. So like, why didn't Chase Bank
create Stripe? Because this whole weird corner
of the Internet of payments processing just didn't feel like
it was worth it. Now Stripe is worth what, 100
billion or something? Now the big companies are
looking to be like, shoot, we should have done this or any of
the car companies with Tesla, right?
It was like, I don't want to do electric cars.
(37:47):
Like nobody wants that. Elon's like I think there's a
market there, goes and builds itand then every company's playing
catch up be like, oh, shoot, we should, we should have done it.
So that's like the innovator's dilemma.
That's the only weapon that we have as small fish in big ponds
is to find smaller ponds. And the big question is how do
you find those ponds? Because it's often the hardest
(38:08):
thing, I guess. Yeah.
And that's where you you have tobe steeped in some sort of world
to find opportunities, right? Like that's why some of the best
startups are vertical SAS, right, Or vertical software
people who were in an industry and have seen that the industry
is lacking this type of softwareand then making software for it.
(38:28):
So, you know, they work in, I don't know, HVAC or something
for 20 years and they're like, man, this is terrible that
they're this thing doesn't exist.
We see this problem every day. What if we could just build it
and we could probably sell it toall the other people in our
industry? So that type of stuff is always
great. Like we think vertical software
has a really strong advantage inthe future, but like you have to
be steeped in somewhere and thenthat becomes kind of just a, a
(38:49):
facet of entrepreneurship. If you're someone who's I don't
want to come up with something new and some new idea, it's a
great go be an accountant. You know, you don't have to come
up with a new business. You can have a nice life, Pick
one of the existing career paths.
If you want to come up with something new, make a new
business that's kind of just part of the deal.
A. 100% And I think that's kind of the beauty of it as well,
(39:10):
because you're always in this creative state in which you try
to innovate, try to find new, new ways of doing things.
And it's also the reason why youdon't get bored in this this
path of entrepreneurship. And personally, that's why I
love it for those that are watching or listening right now
and there isn't a lot about you,but you share where they can get
(39:32):
in touch with you in order to work with you guys.
Yeah, I would say you could always start with our Linkedins,
follow us for a little bit, follow along with our content.
And then, you know, if, if that feels like, OK, I kind of agree
with them from a point of view perspective.
And it feels like you need help with positioning and you'd want
to go beyond that. Then I would say just our
website, it's a good spot to do it.
(39:52):
And you know, see if we practicewhat we preach, see if you can
understand what we do very clearly on our website and who
we're for and all that type of stuff.
Those answers are not clear to you then don't work with us,
right. But you know, we try to be the
the clearest out there of, of what we do and who we're for.
But yeah, usually I would say start with our content because I
think that's a good filter because some people are like,
oh, I don't agree with any of this stuff.
(40:12):
And it's like, great, don't, don't work with us.
Then that's a great point and make sure you guys watching this
thing that the links are down below.
And I want to conclude with something.
If you still remember to tell us, what was your positioning
with you guys already decide when you want, who you want to
(40:33):
serve and how much that change. Yeah, to today.
At the very beginning it was so broad.
I think we said we help foundersmarket hard to market products,
which like cool phrase, what does that mean, right?
What a founder of what type of startup, how big, how small,
(40:54):
what type of products, what can,what constitutes a hard to
market product? What does market mean, right?
Are we writing ads? Are we making campaigns, you
know, running stuff like that. So it was very broad and then
now it's much, much more narrow,right?
And we've just basically really honed in on the exact specific
service, a lot of stuff that we've talked about already.
(41:15):
This is Anthony Pieri on Authority in the World.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
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