This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
I’ve been hovering between two very distinct worlds the past couple years: The startup one vs. the ‘agency’ one
And when you compare and contrast these two worlds you can actually learn so much in my view. It has completely changed the way i look at startups for example.
The startup world I would argue that I’ve been involved for about 20 yrs ever since my first startup idea a long time ago. Characteristics are:
– you build an mvp
– you talk to the customer and iterate
– when you have something that seems to work you move onto figuring out your GTM (Go to market approach)
The ‘agency’ world i’ve only been in the past couple of years when I started watching Youtube videos of folks like Alex Hormozi and Iman Gadzhi. Its characteristics are:
– you are typically selling a service or course, so there isn’t much of a ‘product’ to build
– as there is no significant effort involved in building a ‘product’ you start almost immediately on your GTM and you start seeing whether there is a market
– the key in this world is iterating on how attractive your ‘offer’ is and what channels you use to get leads for it
I cannot emphasize enough just how valuable i think it is for young startup founders these days to at least dip their toes into learning something about this ‘agency’ world.
For example you can read Hormozi’s books “$100m Leads” or “$100m Offers”.
Why? Because when startup founders explain to me their product i’m often left scratching my head… “I don’t get your offer” or i’m thinking “that offer is pretty weak”
And this ends up being their ‘achilles heel’ in their whole logic of how they are going to get PMF.
They might get some customers to use it for free and even say its useful. But then when they actually try to get customers to pay for it or they start hitting the marketing channels…
…reality smacks them across the face.
People just aren’t interested.
You don’t build your product first these days… you try to sell it first. Then you build what you find out is relatively easy to sell.
