Entrepreneurial Practice, Founder-Led Sales, & Small City Moments
Small Cities Weekly | 08.09.2024
As part of the work we are doing on the Small City Segment, we send out a brief weekly post of thoughts, links, and research in progress that reflect the week’s work. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, or things to add. Please forward this on to people you think might enjoy reading it.
Entrepreneurial Practice
Katie Ledecky has swam an estimated 23,000 miles in her lifetime.
She holds the world’s 20 fastest times in the women’s 1500m freestyle event.
She is simply one of the greatest swimmers of all time. And yet, for every mile she swam that became a new world record, she swam over 1,000 that didn’t. She wasn’t born a dominant swimmer, she practiced her way there.
Watching the Olympics over the last two weeks has me wondering how we make it easier to practice being an entrepreneur. Sure, there are a lot of adages that float around about it being ok to fail, the first one doesn’t have to work, etc. etc.
But that’s like swimming in a race, not practicing. Practice allows you to slow things down, to concentrate on the smallest of details or the largest questions of strategy. Practice is about improving, not performing.
There might be a hidden opportunity in the silver wave of small business succession that is starting now. Apprenticing alongside business owners of 30 years is a form of entrepreneurial practice. Programs that have kids starting businesses, no matter the type, as early as middle school is another form of entrepreneurial practice. Bezos and Gates famously had “shadows” - an idea taken from Intel - that spent one to two years following them around to learn the business and grow as leaders. Once again, entrepreneurial practice.
I think a lot about the cultural shifts that are required for small cities to take up more entrepreneurial identities. Building ways to practice being an entrepreneur might be a helpful tool to do so.
Links
You can find links from this and all previous editions here.
Founder-Led Sales with Jen Abel of Jjellyfish, INDIE AUDIO
Sales as research comes before sales as revenue, and everyone jumps to sales as revenue, which is where everything goes awry. So when I say 18 to 24 months, that is also incorporating the sales as research phase. That is so, so, so critical. And you also need to know if — we know that most product market fit lives in adjacent markets. You need that time for the market to bop you on the head so you can quickly revert.
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Seldom does a market actually know what they want. They know the problems they have and that's why it's important to test problems, but never ask the market what they want. When you're going to get a convoluted group of answers. Two, there's a reason why it's still a problem. You're asking someone with a problem, how do you solve for it?
That seems ludicrous to me, sales, and I'll be the first one to say, this is unbelievable. To help understand positioning and refinement, meaning we are here, we need to go to here that research piece. I call refinement research. The same thing. Positioning is important because that's all about how do you want to speak to the market, which again, sales can own.
When it talks about how to service that problem, my God, you got to leave that to a founder or a product person, someone that is going to say no. Sales will always say yes. If you're saying yes the entire time, you're going to have a Frankenstein. Someone has to own no, no and subtraction. And the most important part of any product, that's the beauty of it.
This is a great listen for anyone interested in early-stage B2B sales. I especially love the idea that customers can tell you what the problem is, but it’s the founders job to define and create the right solution.
The World’s Most Dominant Olympian Keeps Raising the Bar—and Keeps Getting Paid, Joshua Robinson & Ben Cohen, WSJ
But there’s one person who does stand to make a killing whenever Mondo Duplantis wins and sets a new world record. His name is Mondo Duplantis.
That’s because major track meets offer bonuses to athletes if they break a world record. In other words, Duplantis has a powerful incentive to keep bumping the bar to unprecedented altitude—but only by a single centimeter each time. The man who can climb more than 20 feet high is always trying to catapult himself just 0.4 inches higher.
At a pre-Olympic meet last month, Duplantis attempted to break his record and just barely missed. It cost him $50,000.
But on Monday, when he did manage to clear the bar at 6.25 and Abba reverberated around the Stade de France, it made no sense for him to shoot for 6.26. In fact, it would have been a terrible financial decision. The more often he breaks his own record, the more he gets paid.
Another great illustration of how the way we measure success influences the way we act - even for especially internally motivated people like Olympians.
Preaching the Gospel of South Bend Food, Kath Keur, Food Belt
I believe South Bend and other small cities face a unique set of challenges that make it difficult to hit every mark of a perfect restaurant experience: lack of funding, low population density, and difficulty staffing to name a few. But this doesn’t mean we don’t have incredible moments happening around us that would stand up in any major city.
So, what feels more important is to zoom in, keeping my eyes wide open for these moments and sharing them with you—the people who call this place home.
Because in a small rust belt city like South Bend, it might not be the entire city or even an entire restaurant that knocks it out of the park. But if we’re looking, beautiful food is buried on the back page of the menu, tucked away in an old warehouse, or at 3 o’clock on the patio with the train rolling by. This isn’t Disney World where delight is delivered on a silver platter. It’s more like a vintage market, shuffling through racks of clothes to find that one thing that makes us smile.
I’ve never thought about the idea of “density of moments” before reading this post from my friend Kath. Maybe what separates small cities and bigger ones is less the absence of things, and more so the density of certain types of moments that people are seeking out. Which means in small cities, it’s even more important to know where to look.
You can reach me at dustin@invanti.co if you want to chat more about the small city segment!