20 Tips for Evaluating early-stage companies & making the leap.

Welcome to the new members of the Growth Letter who have joined us since last Tuesday. I hope you are enjoying the content. Feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn with your ideas and thoughts.If you like the newsletter, share it with others.I wish you an incredible and happy 2023. Hope your holidays are well spent with your family and friends.

Today at a glance:

• Article: Evaluating Early-stage companies for a move

• Post: Lifehacks you need to know

• Media: 5 scientific Rules for Making & Breaking Habits in 2023

• Tool: AskNicely to your customers

• Framework: Customer Education for Growth

One Article:

From BigCo to Startup: 20 Tips for Evaluating Early-Stage Companies & Making the Leap

All that glitters is not gold. This analogy is a much-needed reminder of the number of startups growing on a year-on-year basis. With the current climate not helping candidates, this article focuses on what you should focus on when eyeing an early start-up role and the questions you ask yourself. This is a list of 20 targeted for evaluating an opportunity at a startup — from assessing the company and its long-term trajectory, to how you might fit with the team and role, to questions to ask during the interview process, and advice for shifting your mindset.

One Post:

Ben Meer shares 30 lifehacks that you should know in your 20s. Some great ones and hope they can help you become a better version of yourself.

One Media:

Steven Bartlett (Founder of ‘Diary of a CEO’) provides what he calls “the most scientific” method of having a positive outcome of the New Year resolutions that you make. He shares 5 scientific Rules for Making & Breaking Habits in 2023 that will benefit you in sticking to your goals. You can listen & watch the episode here.

One Tool:

AskNicely is the customer experience platform built for service businesses. The industry-leading platform connects the dots between employee experience, customer experience, and revenue growth by leveraging real-time customer feedback. AskNicely services over 1,400 companies worldwide.

One Framework:

The customer education growth framework is a tool for designing a customer education strategy that aligns with the growth priorities of your company. It also gives you a means how to communicate your strategy to your executive team when they ask, "What else can we do to grow our business?"

The Framework focused on 4 steps to make

1) Enabling Customers:

You can enable customers in the following manners:

a) Product training: This is the functional use of the product; what you'd expect to teach customers. For example, how to use product features.

b) Onboarding: This is not just about training. This is also about getting customers kicked off, implemented, and set up to be self-sufficient.

c) Teaching customers your methodologies: There are two methodologies that are relevant here. First is the job methodology your product was designed to address. Every software product was designed to address a certain way of doing something. CRMs changed sales processes. Project management software changed how project management is done. Your method for the new way of working needs to be taught to customers. Second is your roll-out methodology. You know how successful customers implement your software. Teach that to customers and set them up for success2) Grow Customers: There are 3 ways of doing it.

a) What's possible: Help customers understand and learn the various possibilities of your software. Most customers bought your software for a small number of core use cases. And even if they bought your software for everything it can do, customers often fall into habits and use a minimal number of features or use cases. Your job in customer education is to help customers learn what is possible and what else is possible.

b) Jobs to be done: Help customers understand all the different jobs they can do in with your product. This is different than use cases. Reporting is an example. Your project management software product is not a reporting tool, but every one of your customers will have to run reports and present the data in meetings. Help customers do that job.

c) Challenge customers: You should help customers work the right way. Most of your customers have habits and ways of working. Your customers are used to doing things this way. It's actually better to do things this way. Here's why. See, look at how much better life can be if you do things this way.

3) Win customers

Training is a marketing and selling tactic. When you train your customers you provide them with something new to learn and use. You can measure whether this step is successful by looking at how many of the people who take your public training go on to close deals. Second, measure sales velocity.

4) Create Markets

The ultimate step is to create demand by being a force in the market. With the certification courses, you can do that:

a) People who want to earn a certification and put it on their Linkedin profile;

b) Hiring managers who list your certifications on their job descriptions;

c) Companies (software buyers) who send people to your certification courses, so they can get the most out of their investment in your product.

Look at any credible list of top technology certifications and ask yourself whether someone can get a job in those domains without one of those certifications.

That's how valuable the certification is.

Tim’s Hiring Zone:

You can find growth-related jobs here.