Part of my responsibility at Modulor Ventures is to keep our business ventures profitable and keep growing.

Before starting let me explain you quickly what is Modulor Ventures. We a group of 5 companies and talented people (65+) building and scaling ventures with different business models → so far our companies are mendesaltaren (Product design studio), Minimum.run (NoCode agency), Nocodehackers (NoCode academy), Polyflow (Translation SaaS) and Upgrade.camp (EdTech).

Our companies are in different stages and their business models are different, so we face different challenges but we also find common areas to focus in order to keep growing and improving efficiency.

There are times that we get lost in day-to-day operations and then by the end of the month or quarter suddenly we wonder questions like

• Why doesn't my business grow?

• Why i am not attracting more users?

• Why I am not more profitable?

In fact, there is not an answer because there are many different variables that affect to businesses performance. In this post, I put together a summary of key areas that you need to focus to keep growing your business.

Although, you probably carry out or focus in all of them at the same time, unless you have important machinery in operation, it is important to have them listed and prioritise them according to your business model and stage of your company.

1. Competitive analysis of new markets

If you’re entering in an established market, you’ll need to understand how your potential customers are currently being served.

What’s your competition doing well, and where can you offer something new?

Build a benchmark of similar businesses to get an understanding of their products and services, identify best practices, and note the areas where you can differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd.

Here the full check list to run a complete competitive analysis:

1. Determine who your competitors are.

2. Determine what products your competitors offer.

3. Research your competitors' sales tactics and results.

4. Take a look at your competitors' pricing, as well as any perks they offer.

5. Take note of your competition's content strategy.

6. Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms.

7. Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

This is a visual and quick example about how we mapped the competitive landscape for one of our agencies Minimum (Webflow nocode agency). You need to analyse in detail what they do well and where you can differentiate from them (”nobody is perfect”).

The competitive analysis should be updated continuously, if you are a busy startup try at least to review and update it once a year with the purpose of understanding the trends, new players and innovation happening in your industry.

2. Product research - talk to users!

Interacting closely with your customers and partners, conducting surveys, and carrying out market research, will help you to notice the areas where you can continue improving and innovating to add value to your customers.

Always ask yourself these questions no matter what’s the stage of your company

• Am I solving the problem for the target personas or companies I am targeting for my products or services?

• Can you extend your product range, offer another service, or create a product that brings something new to the table?

As your business grows, it’s important to keep asking yourself these questions so you don’t get stuck.

YC Partner Eric Migicovsky co-founder at Beeper explains the framework for asking questions and collecting feedback from your users. You can watch the full video class here (I highly recommend it).

Eric and us recommend the Mom test book to solve 3 common errors that founders and teams typically do when speaking to customers about new products or features:

• Sometimes we talk too much about our ideas and products, the goal of talking to users is to extract data from your customers to improve your product.

• We talk about hypotheticals. We ask questions such as “if we build this, would you be interested”, instead we should ask questions about problems they have.

• We talk a lot. Try to listen more and take the right notes to better understand your client needs:)

Here also 5 questions to ask your customers to learn how to keep improving your product:

• What is the hardest part about doing the thing that you're trying to solve?

• Tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem.

• Why was this hard?

• What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?

• The fifth question is very tactical. "What don't you love about the solutions that you've already tried?" This is the beginning of your potential feature set.

During user interviews ask questions that extract numerical answers to three facts about the customer that you are working with.

• How much money is wasted today as they try to solve this problem?

• The second one that I like to get to the bottom of is how frequently do they encounter this problem?

• Do they encounter it on an hourly basis, a daily basis, a quarterly basis, yearly basis?

3. Align your teams and goals

Every company wants to continue growing on revenue and profits, right?

All businesses should be thinking to continue improving their product performance and main KPIs such as N° of new active users, N° of paid subscribers, Cost of acquisition, Increase Average Order Value, Increase Qualified Leads, Reduce Churn, Product Engagement, Average Customer Value, Lifetime Value, etc.).

Improving requires total coordination, rethinking and innovation. As you’re interacting with the people who use your product or service, you might find that there are additional use cases in that you can keep improving or developing new product features. It might even be a simple functionality improvement, enhance customer experience, upgrading operations, improving your sales process or trying new marketing channels.

To continue improving your company and results you need to have a good management team aligned with the goals of the company. They need to believe in the purpose of the company and understand the main goals and how different teams work together. The typical teams to coordinate on a SMB or Startup are:

• Management

• Product

• Sales-Marketing

• Operations

• Engineering

• Customer service

Key performance indicators (KPI’s).

Once the teams understand the main goals and are aligned, you can start to work everyday on small improvements or marginal gains across all your teams to try to impact on your main goals.

In the book Lean Analytics, the authors introduce the concept of OMTM — the One Metric that Matters. The OMTM is the one number you’re completely focused on above everything else for your current stage. It could be N° of customers per week, Churn, N° of new active users, N° of paid subscribers, Cost of acquisition…anything that has a direct impact on your company performance.

From there you can build the right strategy and execute it coordinating with all the teams in the organization.

4. Building a strong culture

Although it might no affect directly to growth, it will definitely pay out with team retention and engagement. And remember, your team is your biggest asset.

I believe culture is one of the most important things you need to take care of if you want to have a great team and scale a business.

In order to create a long-lasting culture everyone need to understand that culture will need adaptations as the company grows. Your core values are your constant staples, but the overall culture needs to be flexible enough to acclimate to different employees and changing times. Culture is not static.

Here are 6 tips to build a strong culture, it is a quick summary of this entrepreneur post that I encourage you to read more in detail:

• You need to have a purpose.

• Define and communicate your values and principles, and repeat them all the time.

• Leading by example

• Identify your culture ambassadors

• Be truthful and always communicate

• Treat people right

In a recent talk, we had the opportunity to see what Eric Schmidt, Dara Khosrowshahi, Angela Ahrendts, and Bob at the #MastersOfScaleSummit discussed about company culture.

Here are some of the insights, thanks Laura Gaviria (ex Softbank VC investor) for sharing the insights in this post 🧵

1. Culture trumps everything

2. The difference between management and leadership is that management comes from hierarchy and leadership comes from the heart 💚

3. The higher you go up in your career, the more you should be authentic

5. Standardisation of your offering

Very important to keep growing for both SaaS and services businesses.

Once you validate your product market fit, you should focus to standardise as more as possible your offering. In order to do that, you need to define very well your user persona (add as many variables as possible) and categorise your products or services. Identify your competitive advantage vs other players.

For example at minimum.run we started different type of services MVPs, Landing Pages, Low-Code, NoCode Development across many different tools, etc. however, after more than 30 projects we analyse patterns and realised that we were better than other agencies building marketing websites with Nocode tools but not other products. Since then, this has been our major focus of the company to keep scaling and make it profitable.

6. Branding and Design

Branding

Investing in the brand comes at different stages in a company, if you want to grow your business, you definitely need to have a good brand and design across all your platforms and distribution/sales channels (off and online)

Here are 3 moments when you should invest in branding to improve your positioning.

1. Launching a New Business: You are also building a Brand

www.ehki.com

If you’re launching a new business, you’re simultaneously building a new brand. A branding plan is an essential part of your starter kit.

If you have an existing business that has outgrown its identity — say, due to a business pivot, significant growth, or an exciting new offering — you will likely want to address branding, too.

Once you build a brand is important to apply it to your product.

2. Your Brand is Outdated: Yes, Invest In Branding

www.smarkia.com

When you’re not building your brand, somewhere someone else (your competitor) is building theirs.

Those efforts may slowly widen the gap between their brand value and yours. Eventually, it may hit you that your brand is visibly second-best. Ideally, you’ll never be in the situation I just described. If you ever are, it’s time to add some strategy to your brand, with more passion, more purpose, and more attention to detail.

Some companies put all their efforts into developing their product but they forget how branding and design are important for customers. Customers often make decisions based on brand identity, brand recognition, and product design.

3. You’re Going To Turn Branding Into Marketing and Product: Yes, Invest In Branding

www.erudit.ai

The reason you invest in branding is to make your marketing more impactful. Your marketing investment will be far more cost-effective if it's launched under a cohesive brand umbrella. Your website, social media, email marketing, blog content, and sales collateral all benefit from branding and generate ROI that ties back to it.

Creating a beautiful brand with no further investment in marketing is equivalent to buying a new car and leaving it parked in your garage.

Product Design

If your business is a SaaS or your customers engage with your digital platform on a daily or weekly basis, it is important to have in place a product and marketing strategy to experiment and continue improving your main KPIs regularly.

Many companies struggle when trying to accelerate growth, especially when they have cross-functional teams. Inertia to keep business moving forward might be difficult and yet it’s impossible to ignore.

Building a high-performance product optimisation program is the answer—and it all starts with experimentation.

Design systems

Very important if you are a scale-up and you want to work more efficiently and continue growing. It will allow your company to coordinate your product, business and technology teams to work coordinated with a a collaborative single source of truth. Here a case study from Figma, Repsol and mendesaltaren where thanks to building a power design system, we have enabled the team to iterate faster and reduce work required for product implementation by 30% → grow faster!

7. Product Marketing

We know building a great product is...great, but if you don´t have good product marketing strategy to position and communicate well the benefits to your clients, they will not get excited about your product and your sales will not be as expected.

This is when Product Marketing becomes key: Product Marketing is responsible for communicating the company and product benefits to prospective customers, the industry, and general public when it comes to launch. This requires understanding very well your audience and market, and having a great process, methodology and technology in place to be able to coordinate stakeholders, understand users feedback and empower business teams and creators to design and build the right product positioning and messaging to the right audience.

There are many things you can do on product marketing, but we are going to provide you a shortlist of main tasks. According to productmarketingalliance, the main responsibilities and tasks are:

• Product positioning and messaging

• Managing product launches

• Creating sales collateral

• Customer and marketing research

• Storytelling

• Reporting on product marketing success

• Content marketing

• Website management

• Onboarding customers

• Product roadmap planning

For one product marketer, creating sales collateral might make up 60% of their job and for another, it might account for just 25% of it. Because the role is still relatively new, many companies are still figuring out the main goals and responsibilities. On top of that, the product marketing role responsibilities falls between Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Service.

Product Marketing can help product teams providing customer feedback and marketing insights. It can also help marketing & sales teams positioning well their products. Product Marketing is a key department to help organisations to increase leads generation and sales.

8. Win-Win Partnerships

Building strategic relationships with the right companies can give you a major boost. For one, you can reach a new audience right away. You can also build a stronger reputation and gain more insight into the market.

Affinity marketing strategies and co-branding new products or services are two major examples of strategic alliances.

The best strategic alliances are the ones that offer clear benefits to the audiences of both companies. For example, we do cross-selling with other firms and we also make partnerships to work together for some customers.

When a partnership appeals to both audiences, then the two businesses are able to expand their reach and generate more sales. It’s a win-win strategy!

Here 2 examples of recent partnerships:

• Wallbox & Uber

• Minimum & Webflow

In our case, our service agencies have partnerships with Consulting Firms, Venture Capital firms, Motion studios, Development Agencies and software companies such as Webflow, NSUE Studio, Acid Tango, FIK and MrMilu.

Why these partnerships?

Strategy consulting firms: We complement their business strategy consulting model. We build new products for corporates once they have created the right business model.

Venture capital firms: We help their portfolio companies with branding, design, marketing, and development.

Development agencies: They complement our offering with different technologies that we might not have available within our group. We work with different development boutique agencies specialized in different technologies and use cases (Shopify, React Native, Flutter, Mobile, Web, etc.)i

Video & motion studio: They allow us to animate our customers product marketing websites and products with motion and videos to explain the new products.

Webflow: Win-win strategy. We sell their technology and we provide professional services to work around their platform. They provide us leads from their home page.

9. Content marketing and sales automation

First, considering your business already have a great website explaining your value proposition, services and products, your growth strategy should include creating content (articles, videos, podcast, webinars…) for your site and marketing distribution channels (Instagram, TikTok, Linkedin, Twitter…) to connect with your users, fans and customers.

Get familiar with your customers motivations, language and make your messaging clear and personalized for each buyer persona and region. Focus on their main pain points and how your product solves them. Create landing pages, case studies, collect client testimonials, provide tips, talk about your values, team and culture to build a closer relationship with your customers.

Content is king and can help you position around key topics for your future customers. You should focus to position SEO/SEM on search engines and communicate your message across different social and media channels depending on your target persona. Customize your assets and messages depending on the distribution platform.

Second, build an automated processes in place that ensure a consistent customer experience and a seamless training program for your team. That way, the steps it takes to close a sale are tried and true, and your vision is aligned both internally and with the customer’s expectations.

It is important you create a Sales Playbook where you detail sales methodologies, processes, and specific resources such as call scripts, email templates, negotiation questions, buyer personas, customer pain points, and more into one cohesive document.

Here there is a great description from Pipedrive about what your Sales Playbook should contain (the CRM we use in our sales team to manage the pipeline):

Then select the right tools to automate your process: There are amazing tools out there. Depending on the stage of the company we might recommend one stack or another one.

The more common tools we see to automate funnels:

Salesforce - Corporate

Hubspot - Midmarket

Pipedrive - Startups / SMB

For automations, we use Make and Zappier. And typically we integrate CRM with chat channels such as Slack, Email, and Telegram.

10. NPS, MRR and referrals

Measuring and improving your customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) is crucial to continue improving your customer satisfaction and loyalty. It is very important to understand your strengths and areas of improvement. Obsess yourself to continue improving your NPS and you will be able to generate recurrent revenue and upsells.

Happy customers are worthy, they will probably recommend your product services if they are satisfied.

Your customers can become your brand ambassadors and refer your services and products to their industry peers. Customers who engage in these behaviours are “multiplier customers”: they help firms multiply their business growth.

Referral programs make it easy for businesspeople to recommend your products or services to other companies, and often reward businesses for making these recommendations. Referred leads are the most valuable, because of the trust they place in their peers – they’re easier to nurture and more likely to convert into sales.

Loyalty building doesn’t stop once you’ve created a solid customer base. You should continually look for new ways to show your appreciation to them, whether that be exclusive treatments, special promotions, dedicated programs, or early access to new products, features, or events.

Here there is an excellent post about how to create a multiplier effect with your customers.

Networking Participate, host events and join industry communities

Take the opportunity to expand your professional network by attending events in your industry.

Whether that be a professional networking mixer, a trade show, a meet-and-greet, or anything in between, these in-person events can help you build relationships within your field. You might meet the people who’ll help you grow your business—partners, employees, investors, customers, and supporters.

There are many events in the world, so you need to make sure you attend those that are relevant to your business and where you can find your audience. You need to connect with your industry peers and clients in physical or online events. You can also influence your industry by speaking at public events.

Here some of the main events where the tech world meets:

• CES

• 4YFN at Mobile World Congress

• Startup Grind

• SXSW

• Viva Tech

• Slush

• Web Summit

• South Summit

• And many others events around the globe.

Joining communities from your industry can also be rewarding to be up to speed on the latest trends and share pains and challenges that you and your competitors and partners might be facing as well.

In our case, we are part of the Webflow community, where we interact via slack with thousands of users across the globe. And we have our own community of designers at mendesaltaren and NoCode Lovers and Nocodehackers.

Bonus! Financing 💲

Ideal scenario: Your clients will finance your business and you don’t have to raise money.

However, we know that’s very hard because sometimes as you’re growing you might find that you need additional funds to grow your team, invest in marketing, products, technology, new market, etc.

In that case, don’t hesitate to look for outside financing that can help you on your way. This does involve a major decision though, so don’t take the process lightly.

Consider the pros and cons of different financing options before you move forward.

Not sure where to start? Here are the typical ways to start funding your business depending on the stage. From seed to IPO (A dream come true):

What are the main options to fund your company?

1) Equity investments

• Family, Friends and Fools (FFF)

• Business Angels

• Venture Capital - List of top VCs

• Private Equity Firms - List of top VCs

2) Debt

• Debt. Traditional debt is getting funding from banks. If you go for debt, when making your choice, look into rates, terms, fees, and any other costs involved in the transaction.

3) Public loans and programs

• Depending on your region you can find public help for specific industries. These type of financial helps or loans typically are focused on activities related to R&D, Technology, or industries that a country/region need to foster in the coming years.

Here a quick recap of different areas to focus to grow your company:

• Understand your competitors

• Customer and product research

• Improving continuously

• Build a strong culture

• Invest in branding

• Win-Win strategic alliances

• Build a strong sales funnel

• Training and talent development

• Create long relationships with customers

• Participate in events

• Financing

If this has been interesting to you, share it. This time synthesising ideas has a cost, and with little effort on your part you make us reach more people who can be inspired or made to think.

At Modulor. ventures we are helping our partners and customers to build and grow products and businesses nationally and internationally. We provide strategy, branding, product design, NoCode, and agile development services to help businesses grow and have more impact.

In case you are interested to chat with us, please ping us.

I hope you enjoyed this post :-) More coming soon.

Hace unos días lanzaba una pregunta a la comunidad donde exponía ¿Cuáles creéis que son nuestros retos ahora que vamos camino a ser una empresa de 50 personas en mendesaltaren?

Por la cantidad de respuestas de tan altísima calidad, me he animado a resumirlas con tal de que otras empresas en una situación similar les sirva como inspiración. Y de paso, dar a conocer las cosas increíbles que estamos haciendo en mendesaltaren.

Decidir si quieres crecer o no

Sin pasar por este peaje todo lo demás no tiene sentido. Nosotros después de años tomamos la decisión de crecer ¿Cuáles fueron nuestras razones?

• Queremos poder escoger y escoger entre proyectos grandes (para estos hace falta estructura y solvencia)

• Queremos especialistas para darle el extra en el acabado final: Motion, contenido, front-end (Entre los 10 y 30 no hay espacio para especialistas).

• Compartir el momento vital entre socios y equipo operativo para hacer crecer nuestra compañía.

Esta decisión es la más importante. Si como socios y equipo no hay alineamiento por crecer da igual el resto de reflexiones y tweets compartidos abajo.

Para esto, siempre que dudes recuerda lo que nos dice Iñaki Arrola:

Suscríbete ahora

Reto 1: Mentalidad de doer a thinker

Cuando estás en el día a día del negocio: mentorizando, ejecutando y vendiendo es más sencillo trasladar tu cultura a cada uno de los puntos de contacto en la creación de valor de tu compañía. A tu equipo.

El crecimiento trae consigo la priorización. La velocidad se disminuye para dar paso a mayor impacto, la gestión del riesgo puede alejarnos de la frescura del “hazlo ahora” para pasar a discutir sobre si hay presupuesto o si esa “locura” tiene espacio en el plan estratégico del año.

El reto está en a pesar de ser grandes, nunca perder la mentalidad del doer. Que los procesos no maten la frescura que te ha llevado hasta aquí. La ventaja de ser el pequeño no es tanto la velocidad si no precisamente esas ideas y ejecución que nos hacen únicos.

Reto 2: Operaciones

Este reto lo descubrimos cuando nos quisieron comprar por segunda vez. Es un patrón que se repite (siempre que lo intentan nos dicen lo mismo), imagino que será una técnica para negociar: asustarnos y dejarnos vulnerables para negociar a la baja.

Lo que hemos escuchado en varias ocasiones:

• Cuidado que te vas a cansar

• Cuidado que viene la crisis

• Yo sé más que tú o lo hice antes

Del último punto aprendimos mucho. Para ese entonces nos faltaba estructura y madurez. Ellos nos proponían equipos para:

• Recursos humanos

• Financiero

• Operaciones

Jorge Galindo nos comparte sus puntos:

Nosotros nos anticipamos a esta necesidad.

Aplicamos EOS y su metodología. Llegamos a ella gracias a David Roch y al éxito que la misma tiene dentro de Marketgoo. Después de analizarlo lo pusimos en marcha y empezamos a darle forma más sólida, en concreto al equipo de operaciones, recursos humanos y financiero.

Si quieres profundizar en qué es EOS, o bien puedes contratar a David Macías para que te ayude como nos ayudó a nosotros, o escuchar este podcast donde Product Hakers cuentan sus experiencias.

Lo más doloroso como comenta Jorge Galindo es asumir, que hay un equipo o equipos que ya no tiene asociados proyectos. Que sus horas no son facturables de forma directa, y como dicta financiero, deben están dentro de nuestros costes fijos dentro del precio hora.

Reto 3: Mandos intermedios

El reto 3 va alineado con el reto 2. Te alejas del día a día para poder delegar. Al alejarte pierdes visión del detalle para centrarte en mentorizar y alinear esos mandos intermedios que te van a permitir escalar.

Esto genera ruido.

Miguel Carranza lo explica fenomenal. El meter no solo nuevos equipos si no mandos intermedios hace de la contratación y gestión algo clave. Su influencia positiva o negativa determinará el éxito de las iniciativas que vengan desde arriba.

El momento de la compañía cambia. Hay personas que van a anhelar crear cosas nuevas de forma constante y otras pasarán a ser “policías” de los procesos. Como dice EOS, debes poner a las personas correctas en el lugar correcto.

Reto 4: Estrategia comercial

Este es sencillo de explicar. Es fácil decir que no cuando sois 12, es más difícil decir que no cuando sois 50 y los ciclos de venta son largos.

Este reto debes tenerlo presente desde el minuto uno, cuando tomas la decisión de crecer o no. Hace años mi socio y amigo Salvador Serrano decía: “A partir de ahora serán más importante los no-es que los si-es”.

Para qué son importante los noes, para precisamente evitar lo que comenta JJ Velaz

Podemos afrontar ese reto con miedo o desde el día uno.

Para eso, David Pardo comparte sus puntos:

¿Cuál es tu estrategia comercial? Tener muy claro en qué somos buenos y que cada iniciativa debe estar alineada con la visión.

Nuestra visión al respecto es solo hacer aquello en lo que somos excelentes, sumar servicios que hagan fuerte al corazón del negocio y alimentar la innovación siempre desde la pregunta del ¿cómo podemos hacer mejor a nuestros clientes respecto a los de la competencia?

🤑 Aquí nuestra cuña comercial

mendesaltaren es una boutique de diseño de producto en la que compañías tanto en una fase inicial como en fase de crecimiento o corporaciones en encuentran a su partner ideal. Vendemos una cultura de producto, que se enfoca en formar parte del cliente, “skin in the game” debido a que si nuestros clientes ganan nosotros ganamos. Y juntos, impulsamos a la innovación y a crear negocios desde el diseño de alto impacto.

Ya han confiado en nosotros empresas como: CoverWallet, Jobandtalent, UEFA, fondos como: TheVentureCity, Latitud, ITNIG, Kfund y corporaciones como: ZARA.COM, INDITEX, Repsol, Iberia, UEFA, Mango, Movistar, Santander Bank, BBVA

A todos ellos les ayudamos con:

• Diseño de producto (equipos on demand)

• Branding

• Sistemas de diseño

• Estrategia de producto

Reto 4: Cultura

El que más miedo nos da. El reto de mantener la cultura añadiendo más mandos intermedios, seguir atinando en la contratación y saber decir que no a los “objetos brillantes” en forma de mucha facturación para seguir foco en el negocio es complicado.

Siempre es más fácil delegar la contratación con base en el volumen. Es una muerte lenta, sin síntomas claros y con una agonía en ventas clara. Dejarás de decir que no, para alimentar un equipo enorme desafiando del porqué inicial que le dio sentido a la empresa.

Para esto tanto procesos como personas deben recordar una y otra vez por lo que se contrata, promociona y despide.

En este reto nosotros hemos documentado nuestro manual de operaciones, nos juntamos de forma recurrente donde no solo hablamos de objetivos, si no de nuestros principios y valores.

Como bien se dice: la cultura son creencias y comportamientos compartidos.

Reto 5: Alinear e incentivar

Este reto lo dibuja a la perfección James Clear, creador de “hábitos atómicos”.

Un diseño de incentivos para una compañía de +50 personas es clave, es el motor que hace que precisamente vayan para delante acciones que están alineadas con la visión y su cultura, y mueran aquellas que no.

En este paso, habrá personas que rompan con la empresa. Los que se apuntaron a la misión para trabajar mano a mano con el equipo fundador, puede que al no tener ese contacto tan presente se sientan decepcionados. Y otros vean como oportunidad e incentivo llevar a la empresa al siguiente nivel, con espacio donde los fundadores les dan responsabilidad y no microgestión.

Rescato el consejo que me dieron hace años: tu trabajo como CEO es que haya pasta en la cuenta y traer a los mejores.

Reto 6: Hacer un exit

Cuando fundamos la empresa teníamos como objetivo venderla a los 4 años. Nuestra idea era con el dinero del exit crear una empresa de producto. Han pasado 6 y no ha ocurrido.

Con los años aprendimos dos cosas:

• Vender una empresa no es fácil

• Mendesaltaren no está diseñada para venderla

En el camino hemos hecho otras cosas. Fundado minimum.run invirtiendo desde mendesaltaren y crear Modulor como proyecto a 20 años vista.

De este reto desconozco totalmente su naturaleza. Pero vamos a trabajar desde la economía de la escasez y hacer una quedada en persona con personas que tienen estos retos. Para hablar sobre escala, operaciones y venta.

Si te ha resultado interesante, útil o quieres añadir tus puntos comparte. Te leeré por Twitter o LinkedIn. Si logras hacer que ese post llegue a un número significante de personas, me comprometo en resumir lo que comentemos en esa quedada en persona.

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Cuando empecé a diseñar todas mis referencias y referentes eran constructores.

Al menos así lo veía desde la perspectiva del que tiene como herramienta crear cosas. Veía a Steve Jobs como artesano, ¡ja! Qué equivocado estaba.

Hoy con más de 10 años trabajando para las startups más importantes del ámbito nacional puedo decir que lo que más admiro es su capacidad de venta.

Solo hay que observar lo que hace falta para llegar a ser socio de la boutique de estrategia más importante del mundo: vender.

Sin clientes no hay negocio, me alegra ver cómo en estos años hemos pasado de celebrar rondas millonarias a celebrar empresas rentables. La narrativa del hoy es “cash is the king”.

Hace un año tuvimos la oportunidad de crear un producto para Factorial. Desky era un test en el que pudimos trabajar de la mano con Bernat Ferrero y Jonathan Centeno. Puedo decir con orgullo que fuimos capaces de crear un producto que solucionaba un problema de forma limpia, sencilla y sin ingeniería.

Pero esto no es suficiente, si me lees con el interés de emprender o quieres contratar nuestros servicios te digo que de nada sirve el craft si no está alienado con los objetivos de negocio y su capacidad de generarlo.

Nosotros en Desky fallamos con el “go to market”, no fallamos en la construcción de producto. Hoy Desky es liderado por un equipo que tiene como objetivo hacerlo crecer y con esto, impulsar a Factorial en la captación de clientes. Eso que llamamos de 0 a 1.

Soy diseñador, pero mi máxima emprendiendo es construir negocios con una cultura “customer centric”. Poner al cliente en el centro de nuestras decisiones, hablar con él, entender sus necesidades, dolores y finalmente vender. Vender para ayudarles y tener clientes contentos haciendo crecer el negocio.

Y con esto, me choco gestionando equipos que demonizan las ventas. Se nos presupone la mentira, la pillería y la trampa.

Buenos negocios, buena gente y buenos resultados. Premisa de Modulor en la que trabajamos para qué una y otra vez en toda la cadena de valor, permee la importancia que tienen las ventas.

Los americanos son muy buenos en muchas cosas; en su cultura, ventas es el equipo más importante de la empresa. Les va bien, por eso nosotros lo descomponemos en:

• Escuchar de forma activa

• Entender mejor que nadie el problema de mi cliente

• Conocer sus objetivos

• Conocer por qué lo evalúan

• Buscar la eficiencia en la apertura y cierre de la venta

• Premiar a los “hunters” y “farmers”

• Realizar seguimiento de la solución y su impacto

• Pedirle feedback constantemente

• Medir el nivel de felicidad y satisfacción

Otro día podemos hablar de negociación. Mientras te dejo un hilo que te puede resultar útil:

¿Cuál es tu visión de las ventas en tu empresa?

One of the biggest challenges for many SMB companies is to expand and open new markets to keep growing their businesses. In order to do it right you need to have a previous success in your own country and build the right expansion strategy.

Why companies go international?

Typically companies are trying to open international markets to sell more of their existing services or products to increase their market size or fees.

In the case of our services companies - mendesaltaren (product design studio) and minimum.run (nocode and low-code development agency) - we want to sell more internationally because the international clients in countries such as USA, UK or Switzerland pay higher fees than in Spain where most of our team is currently based.

In the case of our new SaaS product Polyflow.co (a new Weblow multilingual platform to help Webflow sites scale in different languages with geo-targeting capabilities), here we are targeting international companies from day 1.

If you are a SaaS business or a digital product you might have the advantage that you can offer your services and products remote without having a physical presence with international countries. However, you will need to adapt your product and marketing strategy to local markets in order to be able to get traction and if you want to grow at a larger scale, you will have to end up opening and office and hiring a local team.

Modes of entry to new markets 🌎

Depending on your business model, you can enter in new markets through different ways, here we listed the main ones:

• Strategic Alliances

• Selling Online

• Licensing

• Exporting goods

• Acquisitions

• New wholly owned subsidiary

In our case, since we have an early stage software company and 2 services companies we are mostly focused on searching strategic alliances and selling online directly. Most of our sales can be done online for our SaaS product, however, our services companies might require some trips. If international expansion works well we will probably decide to hire an international team and open a subsidiary in the new markets.

Main challenges to enter in new markets 🤺

There are many countries in the world where you could develop new businesses.

And of course you can´t open all of them at the same time. It is an important decision to decide when and where you should focus to enter into a new market.

Our first decision to take is to understand what are the markets where I have an opportunity, competitive advantage and it can be a profitable investment.

So before making any investments you will have to analyse and take into consideration several factors such as proximity, language, local regulations, local competitors, time zone, cultural differences among others.

Once you have identified your target markets, you will face different challenges. I put here some of them that I consider more relevant:

1. Understanding local competition and your target persona

2. Meeting local regulatory and compliance

3. Understand how much you need to invest

4. Local language and culture

5. Creating an international marketing plan for your new markets

6. Managing teams in different countries

The international expansion strategy will require part of your finance, management, operations, legal and marketing teams.

1) Understand your local competitors and your target persona 🤷🏻‍♂️

Before selling anything you need understand the market, your competitors and target persona. Understanding your competitors will help you understand your main differentiation and competitive advantages.

Create buyer personas for the individuals or businesses that your products and services would most appeal to, and explore how you plan to reach them. This will help you build your marketing, content and what are your main distribution channels.

2) Meeting local regulatory and compliance 𝍒

As companies go through the process of international expansion, growing and expanding into new regions, so too do their compliance responsibilities. Meeting local rules, tax obligations and regulations can certainly become complex as the company’s footprint and workforce expand.

Doing due diligence ahead of time is essential, but sometimes it’s a question of expertise and time. So sometimes this task can be outsourced to an expert and it might be easier for you.

3) Understand how much you need to invest 💲

It is important to understand all of the expenses that will accompany the market expansion. List all the elements you need to invest on to get operate and get new customers in international customers:

• Creating a new legal subsidiary

• Hiring new local team members to expand the business and provide customer support.

• Marketing strategy for the new markets

• Content translations to local languages

• Opening a new offices or facilities to operate your business (in case you don´t work remote)

• International trips

• Attending to events to meet the local clients

4) Adapt to local culture & language 🇺🇸

When engaging in international business, it’s important to consider the languages spoken in the countries to which you’re looking to expand.

Does your product messaging translate well into another language? Consider hiring an interpreter and consulting a native speaker and resident of each country.

It’s also critical to consider the languages spoken by your company’s team members based in international offices. Once again, investing in interpreters can help ensure your business continues to operate smoothly.

Depending on the region where you want to expand you might communicate on a different language. This means that sometimes you might need to adapt your marketing, sales and operations to the local language market. It depends on your target and buyer persona.

Understanding cultural difference, not only language is also important if you are selling B2B SaaS or if you are running B2C campaigns. Details are important, specially when you are competing with local competitors.

Some SaaS businesses only communicate in English because their consider their target personas speak and work in English in all the countries. However, if you want to have a lot traction in some new markets you will need to adapt the marketing and content to the local language.

5) Create an international marketing plan 📈

A global marketing strategy doesn't only cover selling products across borders. It includes layering the 4Ps of Marketing (Product, Pricing, Promotions, and Place) with other marketing processes such as analysis, planning, tracking results, and gathering social proof.

Study your marketing personas and communicate the value of your product in your marketing message. Consider your competitors’ positioning and outline a marketing plan that emphasises your strengths.

Your product's value proposition may change in different markets, so adapt accordingly. Uber, for example, promotes cash over cards in developing markets where cash payments are predominant.

By using a well-designed website with strong messaging that emphasizes the key benefits of your products, you can maximize on all online marketing channels. We recommend using an optimized website, localized content to personalize the services/products and prices, and localized ads to reach your international audience.

You will also need to use search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to improve your website's ranking in the international and local search engines.

Some companies don´t offer the same services in each country, so a common tactic is to target users by language and local IP to customise the messaging and services by country and not only by language.

(BTW this is what we are doing for our customers on Webflow at www.Polyflow.co)

When creating content for your site and distribution channels focus on connecting with your customers. Get familiar with their motivations and make your messaging clear and personalised so there's no confusion about what and who you are selling to. It's helpful to learn about popular cultural references, events, and holidays to create a truly global, local experience.

By creating a compelling communication and marketing message you should be able to attract new customers in the new markets.

Nor sure how to start to build your marketing plan? you can always get help from some templates

6) Managing and motivating international remote teams 👩🏽‍💻🧑🏻‍💻

Last but not least t is managing employees who live across the world. When trying to function as a team, it can be difficult to account for language barriers, cultural differences, time zones, and varying levels of technology access and reliance.

To build and maintain a strong working relationship with an international team, facilitate regular check-ins, preferably using a video conferencing platform so you can interact in real time.

Some of the tools we use to work with a remote team are:

• Slack to connect via chat and share daily stand-ups.

• Loom to provide asynchronous feedback.

• Notion or Google docs to document all the information.

• Hangout or Zoom for video conference calls.

• Salesforce / Hubspot / Pipedrive to gather and collect all the CRM data.

Last, 4 quick tips to engage and motivate your international remote teams:

1 - Frequent check-ins are vital to employee engagement. Without the face-to-face interactions that come with working in an office, the need for regular check-ins is even more important when managing remote international employees.

2 - Noticing and praising your team’s work.

3 - Building a strong culture with online activities, sharing knowledge and organising virtual gatherings

4 - Organising at least 1 or 2 meetings in person every year with the all the teams.

These 4 things will boosts employee engagement, but reaps several other benefits, including greater productivity, stronger company loyalty and higher retention rates.

To wrap up, going international is a big challenge, you will need to build international teams aligned with your culture, in different time zones and scale international operations with local regulations. It can be hard, but the reward it can be huge :-)

At Minimum.run and Polyflow.co we are helping our customers to improve their international SEO strategies using Webflow, allowing them to customise their content strategy and optimising their international content to keep growing and improving their main KPIs such as leads and sales generation.

I hope you enjoyed this post :-) More coming soon.

Inauguro el blog de Modulor, escribiendo sobre una de las cuestiones que más nos ronda en la cabeza a equipos de producto: El miedo.

Contexto

Polyflow es una herramienta que nace con un objetivo muy claro, facilitar a equipos de marketing y agencias internacionalizar sus websites basados en Webflow, sin castigar SEO ni su estrategia. A diferencia de otras herramientas nosotros hemos sido conscientes de una necesidad y creamos una solución que se sincroniza con Webflow y te permite gestionar en un único lugar: traducciones, URLs y redirecciones.

¿Cuál es nuestro miedo?

Estamos ante el inicio de Webflow como herramienta, la cual empieza a crear un ecosistema alrededor de creadores que construyen tecnología para mejorarla, como ocurrió en el pasado con Shopify ¿Cuál es el problema? aun no tiene API ni el equipo a nivel interno para darnos suficiente soporte y garantías.

¿Y si nos mata Webflow?¿Qué pasa si modifican la API?¿Y si ellos desarrollan esta funcionalidad? Son preguntas que nos rondan la cabeza en cada reunión.

Suscríbete ahora

Me puse a pensar y recoger información, con el objetivo de combatir el miedo. Para eso primero vamos a identificar cuáles son los miedos más comunes a nivel general, cómo creadores y cómo managers.

Empezamos con los miedos universales:

• ¿La gente querrá lo que hacemos?

• ¿La gente podrá usar lo que hacemos?

• ¿La gente quiere y puede usar lo que hacemos pero lo odiará después?

El miedo más grande está en: todo lo que hemos hecho no servirá para nada.

Cuando somos creadores nos suele preocupar:

• ¿Llevará mucho tiempo hacerlo bien?

• ¿Será demasiado complejo de hacer y hacerlo bien?

• ¿Terminaremos en algún momento?

• ¿Nuestro equipo se va a ir antes de que lo tengamos todo bien hecho?

Aquí no solo se suma nuestro miedo general, del esfuerzo si no el del tiempo, por lo que ante esta tesitura la necesidad más clara es pedir más tiempo.

¿Y qué pasa si estás a la cabeza del negocio? Si es así, lo que nos suele preocupar es:

• ¿Las funcionalidades se harán antes de la fecha límite?

• ¿El equipo de producto está pensando en todo? ¿Piensa en el problema más importante?

• ¿El equipo de producto está desenfocado haciendo las cosas equivocadas?

Este miedo al esfuerzo desperdiciado impulsa a los gerentes a lanzar cosas peores más rápido con tal de llegar a más. Pero puede caer en la falacia de más volumen pero no más valor.

Y aquí es donde nos encontramos. Miedo por un lado a no tener tiempo suficiente y otro miedo a dedicar poco tiempo a hacer las cosas bien.

Y en el fondo, como me dijo mi amigo Jesús Vivas, lo que más nos da miedo es parecer incompetentes y tontos.Tenemos claro, que en nuestro miedo lo último que queremos es pedir perdón a nuestros clientes porque nos cierre Webflow.

Para esto, estamos trabajando en realizar una serie de ejercicios o preguntas a tener presente.

De esta manera, nuestras apuestas pueden realizarse con mejores herramientas, por lo que vamos a compartir:

• Definir al cliente: Quién es nuestro cliente y cuál es el pain que tiene.

• Definir qué debe tener el producto: Entender los “debe” y los “sería bueno” para entender al cliente y su pain mejor que nadie e ir priorizando lo más importante.

• Definir el valor creado: Definir cómo el cliente después de usar Polyflow mejora sus resultados de negocio.

• Visibilizar costes: Dar visibilidad de los costes necesarios para abordar las funcionalidades y de esta manera tener conocimiento del esfuerzo vs el impacto.

• Visibilizar riesgos: Dejar espacio para que cada miembro del equipo pueda compartir los riesgos que ve en el desarrollo del producto.

• Alinear equipo: Crear un documento con los acuerdos, los riegos, planes de acción y responsabilidades con una franja determinada. Por último, hacer seguimiento en cada reunión de revisión de producto.

Mientras definía este ejercicio, recordaba otro tweet que me compartía Jesús, en el cual mediante está matriz podíamos ver qué nos hacía falta para seguir empujando con valentía, sabiendo nuestros riesgos y enfocarnos a lo más importante. Crear un producto que cambie la vida de nuestros clientes.

Dirigir con incertidumbre es un ejercicio mental y emocional muy costoso. El visibilizar miedos, riesgos y sentimientos nos ayuda a partir de premisas. Esto descarga los “y si…” y nos centra en los “qué vamos a hacer”. Por esto, entender cuáles son los miedos más comunes, ponerles nombre y compartirlos nos despeja para tener claridad y tener foco.

Si tuviera que simplificar el proceso sería:

• Compartir premisas con el equipo sobre el problema

• Escuchar los miedos de cada uno de nosotros

• Sintetizar premisas comunes

• Comunicar desacuerdos

• Centrarnos en el problema

• Identificar riesgos

• Crear plan de acción

• Pedir compromiso de todos de enfocarnos en el plan de acción y no en los miedos

Si esto te ha resultado interesante, compártelo. Este tiempo sintetizando ideas tiene un coste, y con poco esfuerzo de tu lado nos haces llegar a más personas a las que poder inspirar o hacer pensar. Si tienes un recurso para solucionar este problema, escribe en los comentarios :)

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Referencias:

The Elements of Product Management

Practical Advice for Product Managers Working With Early Stage Startup Founders.

Listen now (4 min) | [Note: For this month’s newsletter, I’ll be using an AI to generate my voice and an accompanying ~5 minute podcast. So you can have this play and get your morning coffee (@Igor). Leave a comment if you hate or like it.] Product managers who have never worked with early stage founders often find their first experience a bit jarring. “f**ked” and “crazy” h…

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There comes a point in your life when you realize you have more to gain and less to lose. That is the exact moment you are able to reach your full potential. Often we hold ourselves back from taking …

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5 years ago · 39 likes · 11 comments · Deb Liu

• https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-management-fears-and-how-to-face-them/

• https://productschool.com/blog/sin-categoria/overcome-fear-product-manager