Entrepreneurship is sexy and compelling.
You call your own shots. You're the master/mistress of your own domain.
It's an ideal way to make a living.
Well, that's the perception.
The reality is that entrepreneurship is stressful. It's a 24/7 activity that takes blood, sweat, and tears.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Luc Bohunicky and I explore the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and what entrepreneurs must do to develop products and attract an audience.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: My name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty minutes or less. On today's show, I'm talking with Luke Ohaneke, a podcaster, LinkedIn aficionado, and senior growth manager at DeepDive Technology Group. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Luke.
Luc Bohunicky: Thanks a lot for having me. It's, nice to get one on the books here.
Mark Evans: Gone back and forth a lot on LinkedIn like I have with a lot of people for the last six months and really enjoyed our conversation. So it's I'm really excited to have you on on the podcast today. One of the things that you talk about a lot is entrepreneurship. And I think what we've both seen so far this year is a lot of people unfortunately have lost their jobs and are exploring the idea of doing their own thing, of being the master or mistress of their own domain. But there's a lot of myths around entrepreneurship. From the outside looking in, it appears to be a very sexy, very glamorous, very exciting activity. But maybe you can provide some insight into what it's really like to be an entrepreneur and what it takes to to enjoy that that lifestyle.
Luc Bohunicky: Yeah. That's a that that's a juicy one right there, Mark. And I know that you and I have had these conversations on LinkedIn, and that's one of the beauties that I love about LinkedIn. It gives you a chance to vet your own thoughts and and understand if you're crazy or if other peoples are people are crazy just like you. So, yeah, I definitely think there's a lot of misconceptions about entrepreneurship. Maybe we'll get into a couple of those today. I definitely got into entrepreneurship for the wrong reasons. So I think I would have gone into it anyways. I'm 30 years old now. I got in, I guess, right out of university technically before that happened. But, yeah, I got sucked into the glamour side, man. I have to say, you know, like I said, I think I'm I'm a born entrepreneur, and I would have done it anyways. But you get this idea that it's a good way to make money. You get this idea that it's a good way to have this lifestyle. But, you know, I guess you get caught up in that, and you start, you know, believing that that's it. You start you stop thinking that, you know, you actually need to work hard to do it. You stop thinking about what lifestyle you need to have. You stop thinking about, do I even like this business? Do I even like working nine to nine? Do I even like sacrificing my weekends? So I think a lot of people get into it for the wrong reasons, and that's probably why lots of people get out. I think that, you know, a true entrepreneur is somebody that's tried multiple times and is still sticking to it. I don't think we should have an ego about what is defined as an entrepreneur. I think it's a verb and not a noun. And, yeah, I just think that we need to break some of these social stigmas because it's a lot of work. It's not for everybody. It's not sexy. It can be, but holy smokes, you learn a lot by doing it.
Mark Evans: Yeah. You do learn a lot, it is very exciting. I mean, while you kind of got into entrepreneurship for all maybe the wrong reasons, I consider myself to be an accidental entrepreneur because Ah. In 2008, I got laid off by a startup. There was this thing called the global credit crunch, and they didn't need marketers anymore. And I didn't know what I was gonna do. I had three kids. I had a mortgage, and I was I gonna get a full time job? And fell into consulting. I got a consulting gig, and then I got another consulting gig, and all of sudden, I was an entrepreneur. So I think one of the things that people need to keep in mind is that entrepreneurship happens for lots of different reasons. Sometimes it's by design. Sometimes you're you're hit with a brainstorm that you just you can't ignore or an itch that you can't stop from scratching. And sometimes it's just, you know, right place, right time. So I think that's one of the things about entrepreneurship we need to we need to think about. Maybe pinpoint one or two entrepreneurial myths that you wanted to dispel.
Luc Bohunicky: To to highlight your point, there's no one way, shape, or form of entrepreneurship, and I think that's the beauty of it. And that's why we need to kinda get rid of these stigmas. I personally think that one of the biggest myths is that you need to know something. So, of course, you know something, but the idea that you need to be the master of a particular domain in order to go into a business and start a startup, I think it definitely helps to to have domain knowledge. It definitely helps to know the customers that you want to sell to before you even start selling to them. But I think there is also a disadvantage if you think that you know too much. If you think that you already know the problem that you're solving, if you think that you already know who your ideal customer profile is, what keeps them up at night, if you think you already know everything that has to do with your business, your product, and your customer, I think it kind of puts you at a disadvantage. And I've worked with a lot of really smart technical cofounders, So, of course, I'm biased in that direction, which is good to just be self aware. But when you have people, whether they're technology people or business people that think that they know too much, you lose the whole site of experimentation, which is what I think entrepreneurship is really all about.
Mark Evans: But I would also argue that creativity and the ability to do things out of the box are also important. Recently, read an article about Ben and Jerry who, as we all know, created this amazing iconic ice cream brand. And the story was really about their thirty year relationship and how they've remained good friends even to this day. But when you think about Ben and Jerry, they didn't know ice cream in Inside Out. I mean, all they knew was they liked the idea of selling ice cream, and they liked the idea of doing it in a place like Vermont. So it was more of a a feel, kind of feel good kind of enterprise for them. But were they ice cream experts going in? Absolutely not. So I think you make a good point about the fact that maybe some of the the most successful entrepreneurs are people who are simply passionate of an idea or realize that they've gotta do something because something's gotta be done. Yeah. And that's the magic of entrepreneurship sometimes.
Luc Bohunicky: Yeah. And if I can play off the word creativity that you used, Mark, I think that in many cases, you do know something from somewhere in your life, but you apply it in a unique way. So that's what I love to see is when you have a person that does something in their career, whether it's a job, a startup, whatever, and then they quit that thing, and they feel like they don't have anything. They feel like they didn't take anything away because their career path isn't linear anymore. Well, guess what? Entrepreneurship definitely isn't linear. So I think it's beautiful when you do something really random in life that might not be related to something you do next, but you can apply the skills, the knowledge, the unique vantage point from what you did and apply it to what you do next. And I think that's where a lot of entrepreneurial disruption actually originates from.
Mark Evans: So let's shift gears a little bit. So you decided to become an entrepreneur, and you've got a target market that you're focused on, and you've got an ideal customer who you think would be amazing to serve. How do you go about building your product? It can be both from a either building a technology product or you're building maybe a piece of hardware. So what are some of the things that you need to think about? Because, obviously, it looks as though it's not looks as though you, obviously, you spend a lot of time focused on this particular aspect.
Luc Bohunicky: Yeah. Absolutely. I think I think if you get this aspect wrong, this first customer's first product kind of dilemma, if you get this wrong, you almost a 100% of the time fail. And if you get it right, you have at least a platform to attempt to succeed. So I think it's extremely important, and I feel that you you can't build everything and then go and find your customers. You absolutely can't do that. You also can't, on the other hand, just go to a potential customer and say, hey. I have an idea. So I think that's where it's an iterative process of don't spend a month to build something, but produce something. If it's a physical product, produce a three d rendering. If it's a digital product, produce some wireframes. Produce some type of prototype or really, really rough and dirty proof of concept just to help the people that you're talking to wrap their head around your idea, and it will provide more feedback during that customer discovery, customer development process anyways. So I think that those early stages really, really don't build a lot or build nothing, and then go and talk to lots of the right people. Lots of people, meaning don't just talk to one, two, or three. Talk to a statistically significant number of people. And relevant, I mean, you don't need to talk to everybody that's an exact customer. Talk to relevant stakeholders, but don't talk to your ma and pa and expect to get good product feedback. Right? So those are a few things that I would think about when I go out. I personally like to think about three particular types of customer profiles because if you choose one and you're wrong, like, it's you got nothing to compare it to. If you choose 10, you're spreading yourself too thin. So I like imagining, there are three different types of people that might like this. I'm gonna go talk to a few of all three, and then I'll refine my search later.
Mark Evans: So a couple of things to bounce off you in terms of that show them something concept. So there's a couple of of of cons there's a couple of things people talk about. One is minimal viable product, and the other one is the lean startup, which was popularized by Eric Rees. What are your takes on both of those approaches, and how does it align with your idea of showing potential customers something?
Luc Bohunicky: I I read the books. Love them. Embrace them. Everything Eric Reese has put out, everything Steve Blank has put out, I think it's phenomenal. And I know there's a bunch of other names out there that deserve a lot of credit too. I think the idea of a minimum viable product, the idea of a lean startup, I from my vantage point, go very hand in hand. I feel like it's, you know, it's up up the same tree. And I feel the whole idea is, you know, don't build something and expect somebody to come at you. It's this idea of you're working with very limited resources. It's this idea that you need to be in a place where you're willing to rapidly experiment and really produce really find a way to test your riskiest assumption before you move on. So at any particular point where you're an early stage startup, you're doing some kind of activity that's both building a product and building a customer base, some combination of the two. And there is always some kind of assumption that you should be testing, and you shouldn't look at it as how quickly can I finish building my product, how quickly can I raise venture capital, but how do you get to that next point of learning, that next point of experimenting? What's that biggest assumption that you're making that if it's true, you have a business, but if it's false, you don't? And you go out and you test that. And sometimes that's by talking to people. Sometimes that's by building something and showing it off. Sometimes that's by a b testing something. But I think it's the idea of this philosophy is to go step by step and figure out how to break your startup into bite sized pieces that are digestible, let's say, within a week's period of time as opposed to a month or a year so you can ultimately learn as fast as you can and eat up the least amount of resources while doing it. Is that in line with what you think?
Mark Evans: Yeah. I I agree with you that minimal viable product makes sense. One of the things I do worry about or one of the things that that concerns me with minimal viable product is if you come out with a product and it's buggy and it's far from perfect and it doesn't delight in a certain way, then in many cases, you don't get a second chance. The brand perception has been established. Your one shot at impressing that person or impressing the market overall has disappeared. And so I do have some misgivings about the the lean startup and approach. Do you worry about that at all? Is that do you think that's a legitimate concern?
Luc Bohunicky: I don't want to play devil's advocate, but I will because I hear a lot of people talking about this, and I totally agree it's possible that you can burn a bridge if you release a shitty product and your first customer champion or champions realize it. But I think it's a greater risk if you don't just get something out there ASAP. I think if you find the right customer champion, Mark, they want to be with you because you're casting a vision. You're casting an idea that you're out there to solve a particular problem, and it's more than just a feature or two features, but it's a vision of doing something that's going to redefine and reshape your customer's experience, your customer's day to day, whether it's b to b or b to c. So I think if you're doing something cool enough and valuable enough and you cast a really big vision and you're building a relationship with your customer champion, I think you're going into it saying, hey. This might not work perfect. This might have a few bugs. That's why we're discounting it. That's why blah blah blah. But you make sure that you over service the heck out of that customer. When it goes wrong, you rectify it. And I think in many situations, if you find the right persona of customer champion, they're in it because they want to be the first ones. They're in it because they know that they're getting a competitive advantage, that they're they're innovating. So I think if they if you burn a bridge with your customer champion because your product wasn't good enough day one, I think it was the wrong expectation or the wrong customer.
Mark Evans: That's great advice. And I think I remember someone talking at about a conference is about how to love your first 100 customers is that those are the people that really matter to you because if if you you can can delight them, if you can educate them and get their feedback, then your product is going to evolve. It's going to improve, and then you'll be able to attract more customers. So let's let's shift gears a little bit. You've built your product. You've identified your customers, and now you gotta do what many entrepreneurs consider to be a necessary evil. You gotta focus on marketing. How do you start with marketing as a startup, particularly when you may not have a budget for marketing? That's a loaded question. But, you know, you talk to entrepreneurs all the time, and a lot of them have good products, but you've gotta do marketing to attract the audience to actually make the product work.
Luc Bohunicky: Yeah. You know, honestly, I've never really thought about it as marketing. That's just that's just my personal thought as an entrepreneur when I've had to go out there and, you know, and build a strategy around which traction channels I want to prioritize, what tactics I'm going to leverage within those channels. It's never been like, oh, this is a marketing activity. It's always been centered around the idea of how do you how do you get your first few? Like, it starts with how do you get one. And then after you get one, you build it up into a juicy case study, and you get you know, and you do your PR or whatever traction channel you want, which is a whole separate chat. And then you find customers two through 10 and kind of I don't think you're in this mass market like it's a full blown marketing strategy until you perhaps have dozens of customers. So in that in those really early stages, I really like the book called traction by Gabriel Weinberg, who is the founder of DuckDuckGo, and he kind of says I can't remember, but he says, like, there's 19 different traction channels, 19 different ways you can find or 19 different places you can find your customers. And he provides a framework. And, again, it's very much like, okay. Well, I think that these three channels out of the 19 might work, so I'm gonna run some tests, some experiments. Hopefully, one of them will work out for me. So I've just looked at it as where can you you know, don't look at it as such a big audacious task. Where can you find your first customer? Where can you find your next customer after that? And then once you get into a groove and it's like, holy smokes, we took a guess that LinkedIn would be a good traction channel and it's working, then you can figure out about doubling down and defining a clear strategy. But, yeah, I I I think it's a daunting thing when you think about marketing, but when it's I need to find my next customer in the early stages, it seems more palatable for me. That's great advice.
Mark Evans: And I think it's good particularly good advice for entrepreneurs who are intimidated by marketing because it's usually something they don't know. Most entrepreneurs have a particular domain expertise or they've got their their engineers and you in our world. So I can see how that might be something that's a little more digestible and a little more approachable. Final question for you, and I think it's a it's a bit of a loaded question, and I'm surprising you in some respects. What's the biggest mistake made by marketers? Something that you find hard to believe these days.
Luc Bohunicky: I would say that the thing I find hardest to believe, this is with marketers, and I think it also applies to almost every single other department inside of a business, perhaps except for sales. And it's that some marketers believe that they don't need to be directly talking to customers all the time, and I think that's wrong. I feel that the closer a marketer is with the customer, actually, the more value they can add. And maybe some people would argue against this, but, like, in 2020, I would much rather be a marketer than a salesperson. Like, with the way the world's shifting, with COVID, all these crazy things, like, I think there's so much opportunity for marketing, and I think a lot of salespeople will shift their role to become marketers, or they'll at least start thinking more as marketers than just pure, I'm gonna call the next phone number on this list and try to sell something. So I think that in light of the opportunity in the broad world of marketing in this digital era, I think these marketers need to get close and front and center with customers because if they can carry the voice of the customer, it's going to help with everything, like content, like website copy, like, you know, what what is that what is that thumbnail gonna look like? How are you gonna write your headline? How are you gonna write that Google ad? I think it all spills out from just taking the easy approach, which is just figure out what the customers are saying, figure out what they're wanting, and do it. And too many marketers, I think, play the telephone game, expecting sales to relay this info. They should do it themselves.
Mark Evans: That's great advice, Luke. So if people are looking to connect with you or to consume your content, where do they find you?
Luc Bohunicky: Well, apparently, I'm hanging out with a lot with Mark Evans. So if you hang out with Mark, you might get close to Luke. But just in case that falls through, search for me Luke Bahaneki on LinkedIn. I love talking about early stage startups, marketing challenges in early stage startups, and sort of how to build a personal brand in light of being an entrepreneur in 2020. I have a podcast called First Customer Club, www.firstcustomerclub.com, where I chat with people like Mark Evans, entrepreneurs, founders, marketing leaders on these same kind of topics. So really grateful that you had me on today, Mark.
Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening for another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Luke, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or want to learn about how I help b to b companies as a fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co. Talk to you next time.