February 28, 2024 | Read Online
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The Middle from GrowthCurve.io
Three ideas to level up your week.
Hey Reader,
Welcome to The Middle, your midweek rundown of the most interesting things we've read so far this week.
We're here to help SaaS VPs, directors, and managers level up to become better business leaders.
It's Wednesday, so let's jump into The Middle...
Financial Literacy for SaaS Leaders
Many SaaS leaders lack common knowledge about business financials (like balance sheets, the P&L, etc...). It's a blindspot that holds you back...(And your business doesn't have the time or resources to coach you on it.)
It's time to Cover Your SaaS. A course built around Financial Literacy for SaaS Leadership. You’ll get up to speed on SaaS business financials and leave with a new air of confidence on how to approach your CFO.
It’s your career; 2024 Is your year to own It.
Reserve Your Spot THE MARKET
Austin Rief shared a post on X that references research from Gartner, who estimates that search engine volume will decrease by 25% by 2026.
Austin jokingly says it's no better time to have an engaged newsletter - tongue-in-cheek since he runs a newsletter business.
Jokes aside, his underlying point is very much something to consider - what will the Second Order Effect be as people begin to use AI and Agents?
However you see the future, I think it's more probable than not that the traffic volumes you currently see from SEO or PPC are going to decrease with this new technology.
And that could scream danger to your marketing and sales funnel that is dependent on web traffic.
2026 is less than two years away -- take Austin's message to heart, and start thinking about more direct ways you can build relationships with the market, your prospects, and your customers.
Your audience will be harder to build the longer you wait.
BUSINESS OPERATIONS
Kevin White shared an experiment that he recently ran that helped him to 4x response rates from users starting a trial.
TLDR: Kevin would connect with the person via LinkedIn and send a message (compared to only sending automated emails).
Kevin's approach is simple and something that everyone could do - but on the surface, one would call it "unscalable". 1 person spends time finding individual people via LinkedIn profiles, sending them a message, and waiting to be connected.
And yet all you hear from every software investor, software executive, and software employee is "We need to scale". And sure, the economics of the business make this idea of scale a necessity.
But (and here's the lesson I take away from Kevin's experiment), before you can scale you have to have an idea of what it is that you're scaling.
You've got to create budget/resources/time to run experiments.
And then you have to become very good at finding the experiments to scale and the experiments to ditch.
LEADERSHIP
Paul Graham, the famed Y-Combinator founder, has an incredible collection of essays. In particular, I ran across The Anatomy of Determination.
In it, he writes eloquently about how the key to startup success is not intelligence but determination, a blend of willfulness balanced with discipline and aimed by ambition, qualities that can often be cultivated more than innate talent.
This passage stood out to me amongst the rest...
Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.
As a leader, you have to be a beacon for high-quality talent.
How are you creating an environment that would attract the most ambitious of people?
AI CORNER
We're in on the AI hype.
Here's one way to use AI within your day-to-day work.
This week: Hone Your Idea
Most people are using AI to come up with ideas. But I find it much more powerful when you have an idea and for AI to help you solidify you're thinking.
Try a prompt that goes like this:
I am working on building out an idea for my business.
[Here's the idea]
[Here's some business context]
Now, I need help to solidify the idea, and get more specific.
Can you ask me a series of questions that will help me do that?
Thanks for reading the recent edition of The Middle, from GrowthCurve.io.
Drop us a line, and let us know what you think.
If you found it valuable, forward it to a friend or colleague. We'll owe you one.
🚀
Cheers!
Jay & Jeff
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