How To Create Consulting Offers Clients Will Buy

Are you having trouble bringing clients to buy? How should you bring offers to your clients? In today’s episode, the CEO of LeanStack, Ash Maurya, sits with Michael Zipursky to share his insights on how you can create consulting offers clients will buy. Publishing valuable content helps move your business forward, but that’s not where the whole discussion ends. Through conversations, patterns begin to emerge, but when you can predict what your clients will say before they say it, you should shift to solution designing and pitching. Tune in to this episode and listen to this insightful conversation to put your business in a perfect position to succeed.

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I am excited to have Ash Maurya joining us. Ash, welcome.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Michael.

Ash, you are the Founder and CEO of LEANSTACK, which build tools, content, and coaching resources that help entrepreneurs succeed. You have many well-known clients like Cisco, Propel, Slingshot, and a whole bunch of others that you’ve worked with or have benefited from your trainings and resources. You’re also the author of a book called Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. I thought we could start this conversation about your early days. Before you started LEANSTACK, what were you doing?

I was involved in a startup and before that, yet another startup. Ever since I graduated from university, I’ve always had the entrepreneurial startup bug. I couldn’t, for immigration reasons, start my own company right when I graduated so I did the next best thing which is work for a different startup, which in hindsight was great because you could learn from someone else’s dime and make a ton of mistakes along the way.

If I’m not mistaken, it was around 2010 that you started LEANSTACK.

Technically, I started working on LEANSTACK on the side in 2009 so that’s when I got sucked into what eventually became the Running Lean book. I was blogging and doing all that as a side project but yes, 2010 was the official start of LEANSTACK. It was not called LEANSTACK at the very beginning. It was a different name, but that was what became LEANSTACK.

What was going on in your world? I’m wondering in terms of why started at that time in 2009/2010. You had been involved in a few other startups to that point, but what was the driving force or the tipping point for you to go, “I’m going to now start my own thing?”

Right after university, I worked with a startup. They had a couple of failed projects, like everyone in the beginning, but one of them struck it big. The company got acquired and that’s when I left. This was in the 2004 timeframe. I left and I felt I always wanted to do my own thing. This is as good a time as any so I went and did my own thing. A lot of what I write about now, all the mistakes that I tell people to not at least make those same mistakes, I was guilty of making all those mistakes of building in stealth, falling in love with the solution or the product.

Over many years, I fumbled around. I was able to find places where the product was accepted and it was a decent size company in the end. It was a painful process to get there but to your question, in 2009 and 2010 timeframe, I got exposed to what eventually became The Lean Startup. Eric Ries and Steve Blank kept talking about customer development and those concepts. A lot of that resonated.

That’s what I meant by a side project. I was intrigued enough by those principles that I began applying them and started spending more and more time. For me, the triggering event was realizing that this was an interesting problem to find answers to this being, “How do we build better products faster?” I started as more of a side project, but eventually, it became a full-time thing. I was getting invited to do talks about the book, but everywhere I spoke, I found that others in the room exactly had the same questions that I did. I felt this was bigger than I thought and I got excited. That’s why I doubled down there.

I want to dive deeper into all the stuff you mentioned around companies wanting to develop in stealth mode or following their product or the validation or lack of validation but before we do that, take me back to 2010, the early days of what would become LEANSTACK. How did you get your first few clients? You developed this concept and framework. You had offerings. How did you get those first few paying clients?

It’s by putting oneself out there. It’s almost like the anti-stealth strategy. Prior to that, I was building my product in stealth with no customers because customers don’t even know what you have because you’re not telling anyone. With LEANSTACK, it was in many ways an accidental minimum viable product. I was blogging and the audience was building up slowly, but one day I posted something about this tool that eventually became the Lean Canvas, but I posted a very early version of that and that post exploded.

Building good solutions is inherently complicated, but the real mistake many innovators fall into is that when they see a problem, they often scratch the surface. They don't get deep enough into the product pyramid to imagine themselves building a… Click To Tweet

I had lots of hits and people asking about it. It was more of a customer pull kind of a thing. I said, “Let me go ahead and develop that a bit further. I was already doing talks. I began to talk more about it and began to run workshops and that’s how one thing in some ways led to another and Lean Canvas became much bigger than I thought I would ever get to.

How many blog posts did you publish before you published that one that caught on fire?

I think it might have been number 10 or 11 in the series of blog posts. In many ways and in hindsight, everything that you can always say was good timing, but it was one of those things where a lot of people had this question around The Lean Startup and customer development. There were a lot of principles out there, but no one talked about how to do things. I wasn’t claiming to be an expert.

I said, “I’m struggling with this myself. Here are some things that I have done.” How I’m talking to customers, my definition or my thoughts around concepts like the minimum viable product, and how one captures risky assumptions. That’s where the Lean Canvas post came about. That was one that resonated. The others were getting traffic but that one, but you can see the big outlier of traffic.

I was asking partly because I think often people focus on the success that somebody has but don’t necessarily look at how much work went into getting to that point. When you say, “Ten blog posts,” It doesn’t sound like that many blog posts and I guess quite a lot came before that. What I was wondering was in your journey to that point, did you ever ponder, “Am I on the right track? Should I keep going with this?” Did things click into place for you all along?

The first thing I’ll say is that even though I say 10 or 11 blog posts, these blog posts took me eight hours a minimum to write. You see a lot of people that grab a bunch of content, massage it, put clickbait page stuff and they publish, but these were very much about trying to figure out things. I would start writing and sometimes an hour would go by and I write a paragraph where I have to go back and think some more. Eight hours was on the low side. Oftentimes, I would start a post and it would be a two-week process so I would go back to it and refine it.

These were big, meaty 2,000, 3,000 posts on how to think through these things. I was also sharing a lot of data. As I said, I was running my own experiments. I would share all of those. Even though the number is small, I wasn’t also publishing every day. This was maybe at most twice a month. We are talking, even in that 10 or 11 blog post, maybe 3 or 4 months went into that process to get to that.

Ash, I can just hear people going, “I’d love to be able to have the time to go deep into detailed posts like that.” How do you create the time and the space to dive into that level of depth and detail for your content creation?

It came from a genuine interest. I also wanted to clarify a second thing that you brought up. I had no master plan for turning this blog post or this blog channel into a company. This was a side project. I was doing it more from a, “I have got questions. I need to figure this out for myself.” I’m one of those people who when I talk about those eight-hour writing cycles when I come out of it, my thinking is a lot clearer so I wanted to get good at some of these things that I was writing about. It was my way of getting better at it. I was writing selfishly for myself. It so happened that it benefited a number of other people and that was a great thing to have happened.

At that time, were you writing early morning or during the regular workday or evening? What was your writing schedule?

Something I have written about is how to create that time. I tend to be more of a maker type so I want blocks of uninterrupted time to do this thinking. A lot of it was in the morning. I would wake up and it would be one of the first things I would do. I wrote a blog. One of the blog posts I did is how to find flow in work. One of the hacks is to wake up with an empty mind for two hours. It takes a little while to get in the groove, but once you get that flow state, the next thing you know, it’s time for coffee. Two hours have gone by.

I do a two-hour block and I still do that to this day. Not every day, not as much but there are many days when I’ll do that. I’ll go off and they get ready for work, have a coffee, and maybe do another two-hour block. I do like to keep my mornings empty so no meetings and no interruptions. Once I feel like I’ve done or accomplished something meaningful, then I let all the distractions come in and we get into firefighting for the day.

 

How do you process that? I’m thinking about the consultant or firm owner right now who’s reading going like, “You don’t do ‘work’ in the morning. You’re only doing your thing. You’re not checking emails. You’re not doing meetings.” Have you had to put some strong guardrails to protect that time? Here you are. You’re running your business and things are growing. Was that ever a challenge for you to guard that sacred time or did it come naturally to you?

It was a conscious thing to go do, but I would say that the fallout wasn’t as bad as people make it out to me. Everyone says, “When I do this, everyone’s going to be upset.” When I say it was a natural thing, the first book that I wrote, the Running Lean book, I dedicated it to my kids because they taught me the value of free time. Before kids, I would work 60, 70-hour weeks.

I would negotiate with my girlfriend who became my wife, and we would make arrangements for work needs to happen. When you’ve got young kids around the house and there’s no one to take care of them, you don’t negotiate with a crying baby. You have to make things happen. That’s when I began to go from being a night owl to being more of a morning person, waking up before anyone else, and getting this work done. That’s how I got started but then I began to block up my calendar. Now, I don’t have meetings in the mornings and it’s blocked out. As I said, the fallouts are not that bad. If anything, scarcity creates more opportunities in its own way.

I completely agree. It’s the people who hesitate to take a holiday or a vacation for the fear of things exploding. You take the time, it’s like, “We’re still here. We’re still surviving,” and yet that time to refresh and recharge is so critical and important. Going back to when you were starting off building LEANSTACK, it sounds like publishing content and deep, valuable posts is what started to attract attention and get you your initial early clients and customers. If we contrast that to now, what are you doing from a marketing perspective, a lead generation perspective? What’s working best to bring in new clients and new opportunities for the business?

It’s still content, but I would say that content is now behind the signup wall and not so much paid content. The blog is anonymous and has its own value. I still publish things that way but fast forward to now, there are enough magnets that are bringing people in, whether it’s Lean Canvas or something they want to learn about. We can get people to the front door. We can get them to come inside. Behind the sign-up is where I spend a lot of time trying to not so much create new content as before, but weave it in such a way that it gets people to get to where they need to get to with this methodology.

The main driver in terms of your marketing is that you’re demonstrating value and expertise through your content. You’re putting out valuable and post articles that are bringing people into your world or to your website. When they’re there, the website does its job to get them to sign up or become clients, or inquire. Is that correct?

That’s correct. I would say that’s again where most of the focus is. If we started using a top-of-the-funnel type of language, everyone can do more work there, but it’s good enough to where our constraint or focus is more on once people raise their hands, how do we get them to go from getting you from interest all the way to becoming a highly-engaged, happy customer onboarding and getting engagement.

Let’s shift now to talking about some of the core of your beliefs and what you’ve written a lot about in your book, Running Lean, which is that a lot of entrepreneurs build products that nobody wants. Why does that typically happen? Even for consultants who may not consider themselves at times to be entrepreneurs, who don’t consider themselves necessarily product creators, there’s a big shift of consultants who want to start productizing a lot of their own knowledge similar to what you’ve done. We’ve certainly done this as well over the years.

You’ll see people who will invest heavily and not necessarily only money, but also their time and resources to create a product, something that they feel the marketplace wants but then when they put it out there, it’s crickets. Nothing happens. Out of your years of experience and expertise in this area, why does that happen? What’s going on when people operate in that way?

There are a number of factors that come into play. The first thing is that building good solutions is inherently hard. It’s hard to get it right the first time around, but the real mistake that many entrepreneurs, many innovators, and product people fall into is when we see something, when we see a problem, we oftentimes scratch the surface of the problem, and don’t get deep enough.

We go up the product pyramid and imagine ourselves building this solution and then we fall in love with it. I’ve even labeled that as our innovator’s bias. When we fall in love with our solution, we have already decided we want to build a hammer. The longer we spend with that hammer, the more enticing it becomes and everything starts looking like a nail.

That’s the cognitive trap that we, as product folks, quickly fall into. Even though it may have started with, “Here is something interesting to go explore. We don’t do the requisite due diligence to go deep.” This can go on for hours talking about this because even on the customer side, Steve Jobs said it very well. It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want. They themselves struggle with understanding root causes in the consulting role. Your audience will probably relate to it many times. There’s a lot of discovery that needs to happen with your clients to be able to extract what will work. If you ask them, they’ll give you the surface answer, which again, when you give it to them, doesn’t do much and then they go off looking for something else.

When you're providing benefits, those are great ways for people to come. Click To Tweet

The solution is to go out and not only validate. It sounds like going and having a meaningful conversation with prospective buyers to get their feedback to explore the ultimate solution or what the product might look like. It sounds like that’s what you’re saying, correct?

Yes, but it’s a bit more. In the first iteration of this, I was very much in this validation mindset, which is, “Let’s go and validate which solutions could work,” but if you’re throwing a bunch of bad solutions at people, it’s hard to figure out which one is the one that you aren’t talking about. In more recent years, I have shifted our approach to being more discovery-based and validation-based.

It is doing some of this fact-finding to understand what customers are struggling with now and get into those root causes. Before we pitch anything, we want to truly understand the customer’s state of being and when we go back to pitch or when we even go back to design a solution, you can very quickly anchor against what’s broken and those make for far more effective pitches than if you don’t do the work.

Does that mean that if you have a hypothesis or even maybe you’ve sketched an outline of a product or some service or solution that you feel would be right for the marketplace, even if you’ve identified that in your initial discovery, you wouldn’t talk about that? You would just bring up other questions and it’s there in the back of your mind. You probably have that impulse that wants you to share it and wants you to talk a little bit, but you’re saying, “No.”

You hold that back and try and have that discovery, identify what the root cause is related to the problems that they’re having then come back and think about what potential solutions might look like and have another conversation with that buyer or with that prospective client and then start showing what some solutions might look like and see how those resonate with them.

That’s exactly right and if I also put some framing, there’s a whole body of work jobs to be done and this in many ways borrows from some of those principles. One of the premises of job-to-be-done is that innovation or adoption of products is fundamentally about switching. If I have built something new, it’s a guarantee that if you are doing that job, maybe you’ve got kids and they’re going to school or you are going to work or the pandemic, they’re going to be things that you are currently using.

My task, in the beginning, is to understand in that context what are you currently using and why is that falling short. I get into pitch mode and I say, “I’d love to sell you this video conferencing piece of software.” I’m happy having my meetings at work and that’s going to be me pitching and you saying, “I don’t want this.” If I now understand the context, let’s bring the pandemic here. You can get to work and I have video conferencing software. That solution is broken. You can no longer go into an in-person meeting. All of a sudden now, video conferencing could be a good solution to the same job that you’ve always had. Only now, your old way has broken.

You start to break down what somebody can do or the steps they could take. Almost the framework of how to go through that discovery process or how to make sure that what you’re building or creating is what the marketplace wants or what they would buy. One of the big challenges that a lot of people have around this is the actual act of getting that feedback and of reaching out to a prospective buyer because the mindset is, “Why would that person even want to talk to me?”

Let’s take a consulting firm owner that believes they have a great solution or maybe it’s some new on-demand training where they productize their services and their expertise. They see and believe an opportunity to sell that and to have that adopted and used by many different organizations. How can they now move forward with that idea, even if they’re not going to talk about the idea right away? They know they need to discover, validate, confirm, and think through all the root causes. How can they get somebody whom they don’t have a relationship with yet to give them even the time of day to have that conversation?

There are many tactics that we can get into but the first one that I often tell people to start with sounds simple and maybe commonsensical, but it is asking for referrals. If you’ve got a particular job title or role or person that you’re trying to reach, you are looking into your own network and framing it around or even sending a snippet of what you might be working on, but not so much solution, but focusing more on outcomes. I’m doing work in this space.

We think it can help solve this problem or address this need and very quickly disarm, saying, “We’re not finished with this product or we’re not going to pitch you. We’re only trying to learn from the experts in this space. Could I ask for some time?” Coming from a referral, that’s where you’re using social capital or social currency to ask for a favor, to begin with, but what quickly begins to happen is if you nail a problem or space where a customer is struggling, you’ll be surprised that they are more than happy oftentimes to talk about it because maybe you do have something that can help them.

It quickly becomes a pretty powerful partnership in that way. I would say referrals are a great way and if you do end up talking to someone who gets excited about what you might put in the space or you might potentially be exploring, if you see that excitement, ask them for a referral. At the very end, I come out and say, “This was a great conversation. Thank you very much. I’m struggling to find more people in this space. Could you pass on the same message to a few more people?”

 

That’s a quick thing to do but other more advanced tactics could be posing. You can pose as a researcher, a blogger, or a podcaster. You could be a podcaster and that’s great, but you could also pose as one doing a white paper. There’s still a value there. You are not necessarily lying to clients. You’re collecting information. Maybe you do publish a white paper and share the findings with them.

There’s something that you’re providing that is of benefit. Those are great ways for people to come on a show and be interviewed by you. The nice thing there is like on this call, we can go off the record. If anything, we can always ask questions that are hard questions and if someone doesn’t want to answer them, there’s no harm.

You mentioned in that initial outreach or message saying, “I’m not going to be pitching you or there’s nothing to buy.” How important is it to speak to that? Some of the languages that you were using before were, “We’re exploring this problem. We’re thinking about what some of these outcomes or what they might look like,” but then you said that you might also mention that you have nothing to sell or you won’t be pitching. Have you found, because I’m sure you’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of these examples, that’s an important thing to mention, or is it better not to? Any thoughts about that?

You almost explicitly want to mention it in some way and I do it multiple times. I’ll do it in the ask for the interview and even before we set up the conversation, I’ll remind them again that this is not a product we are building. This is not going to be a pitch. Again, it’s a bit of a disarming tactic because people are used to the, “I’m just going to sit back and pull out your PowerPoint and walk me through everything. I’m going to be entertained or not.”

When you frame it around as being more of an interview and making them the expert, making it more about learning versus pitching, you’ll be amazed that in the beginning, they may be a bit confused about what’s happening, but once you can get them to start talking about what they’re doing in their company and the struggles they’re having, the conversation quickly opens up effectively.

What is a reasonable timeline for this whole process? Let’s not go into deep complicated or complex product development or software. Let’s take the consulting firm owner who has an idea for a service or something that they could productize and build in a relatively short period of time. Maybe they could do it within a couple of weeks or even on a weekend. It doesn’t take a lot of infrastructure, capital, or technology requirements, but they have this idea. How would you counsel around the timeline? Is this something that they should be starting months in advance? Can it be weeks? What have you seen in that space?

The answer could be a bit surprising. Irrespective of the product services, products can be spun up quickly and we’ll sometimes even use that as a tactic. In the Lean Startup world, we call it the concierge minimum viable product. Before you’re ready to build something yourself, I’m a consultant and in many ways, Lean Canvas, the tools I’m talking about, me going into a workshop and teaching is an example of using services that we change later.

With all that said, I would say that irrespective of the type of product, we usually set people up to think of this in terms of a couple or 2 to 4 weeks of doing this problem discovery. Depending on how complex the product is, sometimes that’s 2 weeks of interviewing or sometimes even less but being ready to say this could take up to 4 weeks of doing this discovery work to find a big enough idea to go after. We spend another 2 to 4 weeks building an offer and pitching it. When I say building an offer, it’s not the product. This is where we use this mindset of the demo, sell and build. If you can sell the demo of anything you’re doing, there’s no point in building it because it’s not going to be any different.

People sometimes look at that and say, “That doesn’t work in all spaces. Even Elon Musk with his many products, if you remember the way he launched the Tesla Roadster, it was pretty much a picture of a car that could have just been photoshopped and him telling the world, “We’re going to electrify this car. If you want, put your money down.” That’s the demo, sell, and build. He didn’t have to build anything. You only have to go and pitch the concept.

That’s a great example. We’re talking 6 to 8 weeks as the minimum there. You’re having that meeting with the buyer. You may have an initial meeting where you’ve gone into and identified core problems, outcomes, and desires. You come back. You put together an outline of what you feel would benefit that client or the marketplace. You have another meeting to go over and talk through it.

In that meeting, whether it’s the 2nd or the 3rd meeting, what’s the best approach or the best practice to go from having the conversation to selling, getting the buyer to write you a check or to pay with their credit card or to sign a term sheet or an agreement? What does that look like? How should people think about going from a demo to getting commitment even when they haven’t built out the final product?

This is where all the homework that was done in discovery helps and this is, again, where this idea of switching is such a powerful concept when I don’t know which products you are using and when I don’t know what struggles you have. As I pitch my product to you, there’s a high likelihood that it’s going to miss the mark.

The mafia offer is when you come and start pitching using the words and language of your clients. Customers cannot refuse, not because of a strong arm on them, but because you're using the right language. Click To Tweet

When I’ve done the homework, I’ve interviewed 5 or 10 people like you and I’ve got the words and the language you’re using, when I come and start pitching, we create something an effect that I call the mafia offer. If you’ve watched the movie The Godfather, it’s an offer the customers cannot refuse, not because it was strong-armed on them, but because you’re using the right language.

This is also a phenomenon that happens in the doctor’s office. When you go to your doctor’s office and you’ve got pain and the doctor can give you a good diagnosis, they still don’t know what you have, but the fact that they were able to diagnose you convinces you that they are the expert and you buy anything that they tell you as a solution.

The same thing will work in the marketing world. That’s why these interviews, the four weeks that I talked about, some people in the audience might be saying that’s too long. All that work that you collect, all that customer segmentation data and the insights that you capture, when you now start pitching, you’re not saying, “I build something.” You’re saying, “I built something better than what you are currently using.” You can say this with reasonable confidence because you’ve maybe talked to the same person before or you’ve talked to someone just like them.

If they start nodding their head saying, “Yes, I’m using this product and the problems you’re describing, that’s exactly what I’m experiencing.” In their mind, again, they’re going to be thinking, “What are you going to do that’s different?” This is where the demo needs to come in and it’s not showing your best features in isolation. All you have to show is how you’re better than the alternative. If you can show how you’re better than the alternative, the emotional buy happens and then they’re going to be wondering, “What is this going to cost?”

We can then get into pricing and their anchoring helps. If you’ve got the data on what their current solution costs, you can charge more if you’re delivering a lot more value. You can charge less but if you anchor against it and explain it away versus just saying, “Here’s some black magic price that I’m pulling out of thin air,” people get it and if it’s fair and they see how it’s fair pricing, they ask you the obvious next question, which is, “How do we get started?”

Depending on your time to build or time to get this in their hands, you want to have a tangible commitment. Verbal commitments are good, but not good enough because everyone can say yes and then back away. We like to go to the next level there, which is to ideally get some commitment. Maybe it’s a letter of intent or it’s an actual sale or purchase order, actual money being exchanged, or something along those lines, again, if you can frame the timeline for when this will be ready. If it’s years out, it’s going to be hard to get advanced payment but if it’s weeks out and there’s scarcity and these people want it, they’ll want to park their name on that list.

I heard you say that in the conversation, especially when we get to the demo outline stage. You are talking specifically about how your offer is different from what they’re currently using. If they’re using company A and you’re a company C, you’re going to say, “Here’s what you’re currently getting with A but with C, you’re going to get these things. You’re not talking just at high levels. You’re being very specific to show them the comparisons to what they currently are doing or are thinking about. Is that correct?

Correct. If you go back to that switching analogy, when people buy or people hire your product, they have to fire something else. Your job in that pitch is to break that something else. If I go back to Elon Musk, when he has a zero-emission sports car, what he’s telling sports car lovers is if you care about the environment, you should stop driving those cars because they’re gas-guzzling and we have got an even faster car than yours. We can go fast, are electric, and have zero emissions. For a lot of people who were in that camp, I’ve known some people who were Porsche drivers, and all of a sudden, the next year, they’re buying the Roadster Tesla. He’s breaking the old solution in their mind.

You mentioned a magic number of 5 or 10. Is that the right number of conversations that you should be having before you can feel confident? Is five enough? Do you need ten? Do you need twenty? What’s that number that you would say, “You have to have at least this number of conversations to identify maybe some common threads or themes to feel confident to move forward?”

I would prepare people more on the side of 10 versus 5. It’s possible with five and, again, if you were going into a narrow customer segment, then five could be all you need. If it’s a very specialized service offering, “Five is good enough,” but if it’s something broader, when you’re going to the B2C space, if I’m doing cereal and doing organic cereal or something like it, you’d want more data points.

The litmus test there is in these conversations very quickly, patterns begin to emerge. There aren’t 100 reasons why people buy products or use products. You can take any product in the world and there are top 3 to 5 reasons that come at you very quickly. In ten conversations, if we pick something like a house, why do people buy houses?

They might be downsizing or maybe their downsizing is about too much space. It could they’re trying to get a bigger house because they want to raise a family. Maybe they’re moving. You get a few of these top reasons and once you can predict what people are going to say before they say it, usually that’s the sign that you’ve done enough conversation. You should now shift into solution designing and pitching.

 

I have a question for you from Scott in Belgium and he asks, “A lot of your work Ash is based on developing and using frameworks. In your mind, what is the value of having a framework?”

I’m a big fan of mental models. I believe this to be true and you see many of this being applied in the world of science and business, but problems that we solve have patterns to them. Frameworks give us a way for us to look at and take problem-solving techniques from one area and apply them to the other. Frameworks give us that and then they also give us the thinking models and the thinking processes to catch us. Whether you see Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett before they make an investment, they look at it from many different dimensions. There’s the financial side, there’s the culture side, and there’s the people side.

When all of them triangulate towards this being a good decision, your likelihood of it being a good decision is much higher. The same thing is true with ideas. We can look at it from the three simple lenses that I like to use that come from design thinking, but we look at it from a desirability side. Is this something that customers could potentially want? We look at it from a viability side, which does not only do they want it but can we build a profitable business, deliver, and something along those lines.

Is the price point high enough? Are there enough customers? We then look at it from a feasibility side, which is, can we and our team build this fairly quickly? It’s desirability, viability, and feasibility. If they all triangulate in one place, that framework points to the fact that it doesn’t guarantee it’s going to work, but your odds are much higher than before.

It sounds like you yourself use frameworks in your life and your business to think through different questions or opportunities that come your way, but you’ve also developed many frameworks as part of your business, as part of what you teach your customers and clients, correct?

That’s correct. When you say develop, I’ll be modest enough to say that it’s curating framework. There are a lot of these ideas, whether they come from systems thinking or the world of science. You can take physics and all kinds of things that excite me. It’s like looking at these principles and trying to weave them in a way and apply them maybe in some interesting ways to solve the startup or the product-building set of challenges.

Ash, can you tell us a little bit more about your business model at LEANTACK? Walk us through the different products and offerings that you have. I’m interested to know how you got to where you are today with the offerings. Do they change a lot over time? Have they been the same for a period of time? Walk us through what that looks like now.

My perspective on products has changed quite a bit. I’m talking more about the product category. If you had asked me this question maybe before 2009, I would’ve told you I’m a software founder and I only build software products. That perspective has changed a lot because when we start looking in terms of what customers struggle with, LEANSTACK started as a services business. It was my blogging and seeing that there was interest here, going off and delivering some workshops and getting paid to do that. I did that and while I was doing it, I began to write a book and that became product number two if you might call it that.

That was taking the same ideas that I would share in a room full of people, putting them in a book, and increasing distribution. After that, being a software founder, I always wanted to come back to software. We started to build up this LEANSTACK platform and then it’s just the rinse and repeat. There are services. There are software products and then there are coaching services. Those are all the things that we provide.

The business model is very much of a Software as a Service or SaaS-type of a model. You can think of it as innovation coaching as a service. We have got all kinds of modalities. When I was going with content, we get people oftentimes coming in piqued by some interest, whether it’s the Lean Canvas or some tool. We’ve got a lot of free resources and tools that people can start using. As they begin to level up, we’ve got workshops they start joining. We run an academy where they can go deeper. We can pair them up with a one-on-one coach and help them go faster. Everything we talked about how to interview customers and pitch products, we help with all that.

It sounds like you have free content and that most people go from free content to signing up for a monthly or annual payment on the software side of the platform.

We have tools, content, and coaching. That’s the way to look at it. There’s the free content that pulls people in and there is the annual subscription for the tool side of things. With our academy, that’s where the coaching comes in. It’s a 90-day program, but we also have many clients that come in and do multiple 90-day programs with us.

Frameworks give us a way to look at how to take problem-solving techniques from one area and apply them to the other. Click To Tweet

If you look at your revenue across the different channels that you have or different offerings, how does it break down? Where does the majority of the revenue come from? Is there one that is far larger than the other?

Naturally, since we started with services, for many years, that’s where the bulk of it was. Part of our mission as a company was to flip that. 80% of the revenue was coming from services and the workshops we were running were pretty high touch. Now, it is probably flipped where 80% is the software side of things. We are finding that we want to reserve the coaching for high-leverage activities. We’re using a lot of automation and we’re driving people through a lot of the content.

To your question, where a lot of the attention is going is in how we make this as guided and self-service as possible. In an ideal world, we’d want 100% of it to come completely automated. That is a pipe dream. We’ve tried many things, but at the end of the day, people still go to university for a reason, which is that it’s not just about the content.

They need guidance and coaching. This is where in recent years, we’ve been building a marketplace of sorts where we are still finding smart ways of using data to pair coaches with teams that need the work and help. That’s where we’re at. It’s a long answer to your question, but it’s flipped now where it’s 80% software and probably 20% services.

Ash, before we wrap up, I have a couple of more questions and then we’ll make sure that people can learn more about you, your book, your work, and everything you have going on. When you look at your day-to-day life and how you are able to accomplish, how you’re able just to do meaningful work and feel like you are moving things forward, what are 1 or 2 habits you bring into your life on a regular basis that you feel contribute to that success that you have?

One of them we talked about is this focus on fewer things and carving out earlier parts of the day to get that done. You can almost take that thinking and break it down. Once we start getting towards the end of the year, I start thinking of 1 or 2 big projects for the next year and that’s what kicks things off but from there, they get broken down into smaller campaigns and initiatives. Every day, it’s about how we push this forward.

If I’m writing a book or building a new tool, it’s this big thing that we have to make happen, but then break into these smaller chunks, making everything additive. Hopefully, some of that story got built in with the way LEANSTACK got built. It started off as a series of blog posts, but even though there was no master plan, they all added up to something bigger than some of the individual parts. How I like to look at it is to look at a big goal and break it down. You’re tripping at it every single day. It’s carving out time to do it.

You have the bigger vision or specific goals that you want to work towards, whether that’s a new book or a new tool. Do you reverse engineer that? Let’s say, I’m going to create a new tool and then work backward to figure out what steps need to happen, or do you go from the start toward the end from a planning perspective? How do you personally approach it?

There’s a tool that I built and put in my second book. It’s called Traction Roadmap. The Traction Roadmap is different from a product roadmap and that’s why I wanted to bring it up. It’s more outcome-driven. I’ll use the Tesla example there. In the early days of Tesla, they had put in this hockey stick of how many cars they were going to sell over the next few years. If you had asked them what were the features that were going to be in the cars towards the last part of those years, they had no clue. They knew they were going to build a sports car, a sedan, and an SUV, but they didn’t know what the cars would look like.

That’s how I operate. I tend to create my own traction roadmap. If I have my business, maybe it is driven based on revenue, profit, or the number of customers, but we have a traction roadmap that we use internally and every year the question I begin to ask ourselves is, “If we are going to double the business, where could that come from?” Do we have to build more software? Do we have to write another book?

That’s where the solutions or these products will then come out as being possible solutions to that traction problem. That’s how that happens. We’re not the other way around. It’s not starting with a solution, but saying, “This is where I want the impact.” It’s more outcome or impact first and then which solutions could deliver on that? Let’s break it down even smaller into experiments and push it forward.

The final question is in the last few months or so, what’s one book that you have read or listened to that you’ve enjoyed and would recommend to others? It could be fiction or nonfiction, but it’s anything that you had a lot of fun with or got a lot of?

 

I’ll caveat that question by saying that I am a deliberate reader. When people ask me that question, I read a lot of books intentionally because I’m trying to learn something new. I wouldn’t say it’s a book, but it’s a topic that I’ve been getting very deep into and it is basically a story. It’s about how stories work and trying to dissect them. People have probably heard of The Hero’s Journey and all those kinds of things.

There’s a great editor, Shawn Coyne and he has a book called Story Grid and it’s about how you break down stories and look at arcs in stories. I find that has a lot of parallels in the marketing and pitching world when you are beginning to both do problem discovery, but also pitching products. Customer journeys are essentially stories and if we can get good at extracting those stories, we get very good at delivering stories of our own. That has been a big area of interest of mine. My answers tend to be specific for that reason but that would be one of those books that I found.

I have not read that book by Shawn Coyne. I’ll check it out. Ash, for the people that want to learn more about you, your work, and your books, where’s the best place for them to go?

The best place would be Leanstack.com. There’s a lot of content that’s freely available, but if you are inclined to use some of the tools, we’ve also got a lot of free tools and then we tier up and we’ve got more subscription-based stuff that you can sign up for.

Ash, I want to thank you again for coming on. I’ve seen you put out some great work for many years. It’s nice to jump on and have you on the show and share some of your journey, best practices, and experience. I thank you again for that.

Thank you, Michael. It’s my pleasure.

 

Important Links

• Ash Maurya
• LEANSTACK
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
• The Lean Startup
• The Hero’s Journey
• Story Grid
• Lean Canvas
• Traction Roadmap

 

About Ash Maurya

The new startup game is won at the top of the funnel.

With falling costs of product development and first to market power-law advantages, finding the next big idea has increasingly become a numbers game. Even accelerators like Y-Combinator invest heavily in top-of-the funnel initiatives like Startup School and Hacker News in order to reach and brand their offerings to promising startups at the earliest stages.

LEANSTACK helps you build the top of your funnel through flagship content and marketing tools to track, nurture, and drive engagement. This can be done 100% virtually which helps you source the best ideas from around the world.

 

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