How To Handle Product Disconnect
“Why don’t you give Karen a call?”
I was chatting with Ryan Armbrust, an Associate at ff Ventures, about their portfolio companies. ff Ventures is one of those rare VCs that has built a dedicated infrastructure within their fund to help their portfolio companies with the various functions (staffing, biz dev, et. al.) that they desperately need but are not yet able to support in-house. Funds that devote full time resources to this are rare enough; in the early stage investment space that ff Ventures plays in, it is virtually unheard of.
We were discussing VolunteerSpot, a company that takes the pain out of organizing volunteer-led events. 87% of their nearly 3M users are moms and, since my prior two startups (Bunk1 & Layercake) were both family-focused, Ryan thought I might be able to offer some potentially useful insights. So I set up a half hour call with their CEO, Karen Bantuveris.
Karen and I hit it off immediately. A recovering consultant like myself, she built VolunteerSpot to solve a personal pain point. As she explained, she would turn on her phone after a flight home from a client and her inbox flood with dozens of emails. But work was not the worst culprit; the majority of the email overload had to with her personal life. Every time she was invited to volunteer for something (e.g., with her daughter’s school, her church), she entered Reply All Hell. You know the place. It’s where otherwise intelligent people think it’s fine to spam all their friends with short emails (“I’m in,” “Sounds great!”, “Cool!!!”, etc.) that don’t answer the question (e.g., “When can you man the concessions table?”) or omit key info (e.g., their name (Really?!), their contact info).
Two hours into this half-hour call, we finally agreed to finish the conversation the next day. By the end of the week, we were talking about my devoting a sizable block of time to help them with strategic partnerships and business development.
Now I am a product guy at heart. As much as any non-developer can make this claim, I build every product I have ever been involved with from the ground up, from vague concept, to prioritized feature list, MVP, wireframes, detailed specs, UX, etc. all the way through QA and customer support. But because everyone at a startup wears multiple hats, I’d also done quite a bit of biz dev, marketing, sales – whatever had to get done – so I dove right in.
After a few weeks of networking, I began to notice a strange feeling of disconnect from the product I was pitching. I quickly figured out why: every other time I’d done biz dev it had been for products I’d built. I knew them intimately, inside and out. If a potential partner had a slightly atypical use case, I knew which lesser-used product feature to steer him to. If he wanted something custom-coded, I had a good sense of whether it was a big or small ask from the tech team. But VolunteerSpot was built and up-and-running over a year before I got involved and so, for the first time, I didn’t have that deep product knowledge. It felt oddly surreal.
So I’ve had to adapt a little. I am happy to share my strategies for beating product disconnect… and eager to get any suggestions you might have.
1. Learn the product
There’s no excuse for not putting in the hours. You should know enough about the company to understand the typical use cases and to try to use product that way. Then look through the help section of the website to get a feel for known limitations, suggested workarounds, and other, less typical use cases.
It helps to have a few email accounts you can use for testing, especially if your product has multiple user types. For instance, I needed to experience VolunteerSpot’s services both as an event organizer and as a participating volunteer. If you use gmail, you can set up email aliases on the fly for this. If your actual email is yourname@gmail.com, you can use yourname+organizer@gmail.com and yourname+volunteer@gmail.com. No prior setup is required and both emails will go to your normal address but you will be able to tell which email was sent to which user by seeing which alias is in the email’s sent to field.
2. Set expectations
In my case, since I don’t have an official role at VolunteerSpot, I often frame my participation as my “helping out a company that I am invested in.” So if I don’t know every nook and nuance of the service, it is to some extent excusable. When this is not an option, you might instead acknowledge that you joined the company relatively recently. Done correctly, this can segue into all the great things about your current company that seduced you into leaving your old one. Sometimes the same pitch sounds less salesy when phrased as “but what I really loved about this company….”
And when all else fails, you can always mention a recent product redesign. 🙂
3. Don’t fake it
It’s much better to firmly say, “I think so / don’t think so but let me double-check and get back to you” than it is to fake it and not sound genuine. Or worse, get caught getting it wrong. If you’ve done your homework (see #1 above), odds are that this situation will only arise in response to an obscure or novel use case. Your prospect is likely even aware that he is taking things off the beaten track and won’t judge you harshly if you don’t have the answer right away.
4. Learn from it
When this happens, don’t just hook your prospect up with someone else in the company who can answer the question. You talk to the expert and educate yourself. Or invite the expert to a conference call to answer the prospect’s questions while you listen and learn.
(Afterthought: Reading over the post above, I can’t help wondering how wide an audience it will find. Seasoned biz dev professionals may find this advice blindingly obvious; they may be used to joining companies after the early building stage and accept some level of product disconnect as entirely normal. On the flip side, startup veterans are more likely to be handing off their biz dev role to the pro when their companies reach that level than they are to be taking on a biz dev role at a different company. So please let me know if you found this post useful or not.)
Angel Profile: John Ason
Note: Angel Profiles is a bi-weekly column appearing on AlleyWatch. John’s profile went up a few weeks ago but I haven’t had a chance to post it here until now. Here’s the original article.
What got you into angel investing?
I came out of AT&T Bell Labs, doing bleeding edge technology for 10 years, and then marketing and business management of large telecommunications projects sold overseas. So when I left, this was a natural extension of what I was doing AT&T. I made money in the stock market and apply the same discipline to angel investing: sell the losers and double down on the winners. Getting out of an investment is very difficult for most angels when the company is no longer viable as opposed to putting more money into it. I also play poker and most angels and entrepreneurs are good poker players.
What was your first angel investment? How did it turn out?
It’s either Xlibris or TuckerToys, I can’t remember. Xlibris, the first self publisher on the internet, sold about three years ago at a very nice profit. TuckerToys makes the Phlatball – over 15M sold, mostly overseas. TuckerToys produced a couple of great years of dividends and is still in existence.
What investment do you most want to brag about & why?
The two companies I am most famous for are Diapers.com and Bikini.com. People used to make fun of me for investing in Diapers.com because we were selling diapers on the internet… until Amazon bought it for $545M. And the really neat part was that I contributed absolutely zero to it, other than money and encouragement. It was like watching a really good movie. Marc and Vinit were super operational people and did not need any advice.
I like to mention Bikini.com because that humanizes me as an angel investor as opposed to those money hungry number crunching VCs. I need to have some fun too!
Notable train wrecks and lessons learned?
I’m proud of some of my train wrecks because I learned things from them. For example, MakeUsAnOffer was doing exceptionally well and then we got into some legal patent issues. We were probably in the right but couldn’t survive the lawsuit. Some things can’t be anticipated or planned for and you just don’t have the resources to handle.
Tell me about the startups that got away?
Never had one that got away. The closest I came to this was a company I wanted where a big VC did not want any other outside investors to get in. Ultimately, I got in indirectly through a VC fund where I am a limited partner. In most cases, the startups are just starving for cash; it’s almost always never the issue that it is so oversubscribed that you cannot get in.
Most humbling experience (relating to angel investing)?
Coming from Bell Labs, I assumed I could make anybody a good manager. But you can’t. At best you can influence them four or five degrees. You simply can’t make someone a good manager. That was my first humbling experience.
What impresses you about an entrepreneur?
I like someone who is clear, concise, compelling and elegant. I like to see an executive summary that fits on a single page with a lot of white space. And I love an idea that I have never seen before. Most ideas are retreads or rehashes.
Hotlist especially made an impression. They had amassed a massive database on events that people had gone to, were going to, or would be going to and there is a lot of location based services one can offer having that information. I had researched this area by doing due diligence on a few companies. Hotlist just had everything buttoned down and I made my decision in 28 minutes.
What turns you off to an entrepreneur?
Whenever people use the word “conservative” or “next generation.” I have a secret dictionary of these words which earn demerits and can disqualify the entrepreneur. This is how I “gamify” my investment process.
What makes you different from the average angel?
I like to invest in only industries that I know nothing about and I generally “let the dogs run.” I offer light overall guidance and try to introduce them to people who can help them. I am not an invasive investor.
Also, I mentor a lot. I have mentored companies which I did not invest in because they didn’t need the capital. I do it pro bono, because most entrepreneurs are nice people and in return I learn from the experience. I currently mentor 10 to 15 companies like this. They call me every four to six months for some advice or guidance and it’s usually a 15 to 20 minute session so it’s not a real time burner.
Recently, I’ve begun to mentor a number of international companies through Springboard and the Worldwide Investor Network. I also mentor women entrepreneurs through Astia & Springboard as well as women angel investors within Pipeline Fellowship, Topstone Angels, and 37angels. I have funded 11 female-founded companies, five of women were foreign born.
What financial returns do you target for an angel investment?
I aim for 10x returns. I say I want it within 3-5 years… although that’s never been achieved.
You have been angel investing for 17 years. How has it changed since you first started?
There has been a dramatic change over the past two or three years.
- The costs of starting a company are close to zero.
- The cost of proving the market with landing pages – sign up for the beta, sign up for a newsletter, answer a survey, stuff like that – is also close to zero. You can prove that there is a market without having a product.
- AngelList. I used to do 1 to 2 deals a year, very painfully. Finding a company was a big problem. Now AngelList has close to 19,000 startups on it so finding startups is not an issue. So is finding investors. In the past I used to syndicate deals. In my first 10 years, I knew everyone who invested with me intimately. Now, I tell my founders to list the company on AngelList with me as an investor and they assemble the rest of the syndicate. The majority of the other investors in my current deals are people I have never met.
- Accelerators like ERA, DreamIt and TechStars are producing large numbers of high quality, fundable companies.
- Super angels and micro VCs like John Frankel’s ff Ventures have a lot of cash for angel level companies, assisting in the fundraising process in a very positive way.
- Deal size. The average round until about a few years ago was $250K-$275K. It is now close to $650K. Many of these companies will skip their A round.
- International. The biggest response to my website comes from overseas asking me how they can invest in my companies and be angels in general. I received four investments into my companies. I have also received interest from foreign government organizations and universities on how to foster startup and angel ecosystems. We are also seeing a large number of foreign companies seeking funding.
Pretend that it’s 2019 and complete this sentence, “[Technology X] is less than 5 years old and now I can’t imagine life without it.”
Brainwave chips. There are several startups that let you control your computers with brainwaves and they are starting to get a little bit of traction. They have various devices that go over your head and with this one can control a device that provides input to a computer. As this industry matures miniaturization will occur that will lead to a brain chip.
Will they really implant these chips in their heads?
Why not? I have a defibrillator. I don’t want to carry one around so I had it implanted. They could put it on sunglasses, but fashion will win out and they will ultimately be implants.
What’s the best way for entrepreneurs to reach out to you?
Email me at ason@comcast.net but read my website first!
Also, check me out on AngelList, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest, Spling, Tip or Skip, & PRESSi.
If you are an active NY-area angel (or know someone who is) and would like to be profiled for AlleyWatch, please contact me here.
As Angels See It 