Transparency, Investment, and Struggle - with Rand Fishkin - 158

Transparency, Investment, and Struggle - with Rand Fishkin Rand is an author, founder, recent founder/ceo of SparkToro.  His book "Lost and Founder" is one that I wish I would have been able to read before we started Catalyst Sale. This episode has a fair amount of range, we cover a number of topics including investment, learning, diversity, and struggle. Thank you Rand for the awesome discussion. Questions Discussed Do Founders feel like they are the only ones struggling with their problem? Why should Founders not think that the organization who is going to provide some funding has their best interest at heart? How do you explain the different types of investment? Is there something you can do to help inspire curiosity? Where does diversity play in all of this? How do the MVP and EVP concepts apply to intrapreneurs? Key Takeaways When Founders take capital or attempt to raise capital, they don’t fully understand the mechanics of the investors from which they are raising and they don’t understand how priorities can shift from year to year. VC is kind of a default for a lot of Founders when it probably shouldn’t be. Only 20% of capital firms that beat the market This changes the fundamental incentives of what you need to do as a business It enforces the importance of communication, transparency and alignment Sometimes the story you want to tell, isn’t the one they want to hear I cannot think of a good reason to intentionally impair the most important part of your job which is decision making Find four or five people that you have a connection with who do the same work as you, but are not directly competitive and ask if you can join an e-mail/slack/what’s app group to share your experiences There is a ton of opportunity in doing some extra work in order to get a better outcome If you know you are going to launch to a large audience, don’t launch until people are truly impressed Show Links Rand on Twitter SparkToro Lost and Founder Call to Action What processes, roles, systems, do you want to "blow-up" in your organization? Let us know via twitter, facebook or LinkedIn. Thank You  Thank you for rating and reviewing the podcast via iTunes, Google Play, or your favorite podcast platform.  Ratings & reviews help others discover the podcast - thank you for helping us get our message out to the community. Please send listener questions and feedback to [email protected] or contact us directly on twitter, facebook or LinkedIn. Catalyst Sale Service Offerings Growth Acceleration - Plateau Breakthrough Product Market Fit Demystify Sales - the course Are you looking for a way to improve your capability in sales, and grow your business? Would you like a framework, methods, approach, and tools that can help you put the concepts discussed on the podcast, into practice? This course is designed for you. We will apply the Revenue Operations Framework (Know your Customer, Know your Business, Know your Approach) and the foundational Sales Skills (Gathering Data, Story, Time Management, Project Management), to help you design your playbook, and start executing. Thank you