Awesome People - Ep 104
Freelance designer, PMF, Pallet now open to everyone, web2 + web3
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
We deliver awesome people to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, and ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable.
In addition to this newsletter, we also run a Pallet job board. We’ve officially opened up our Pallet to everyone, in web2 and in web3. Shit is really hard right now, so whether you’re web2 or web3, we don’t care. It’s all the same long-term, anyway. Let’s just all help each other out and give your friends a big hug 🥰
Know someone who is looking for a job? Tell them to join our Pallet board.
Want to hire top talent? Join our Pallet Collective to get access to 180+ pre-vetted candidates.
Get 1 month 50% off the Pallet Collective with the code awesomecollective50, cancel anytime. If you’re a port co, you get free access, so email me for the fanciest of fancy codes 🤗
Please meet Cassius Kiani, your Freelance Product and Venture Designer 🧑💻
He was referred by Shre Shrestha, our Awesome People Fellow. Cassius is trusted by the community at South Park Commons and recently funded startups like Eureka Health, Mori Global, and Helios DAO. Check out his visual resume here. It’s pretty awesome 👀
Before going freelance, Cassius led product and growth for Mora.com, a healthcare startup that creates physician-led support groups to reverse chronic disease. Throughout his career, Cassius has raised over $15 million for his startups. He also won the coveted Apple Design Award. One little-known fact about Cassius is that he almost broke the world record for most words memorized in 5 minutes 🤯
You can hire him to help design and ship something from nothing. Cassius specializes in complex, messy projects focused on product-market and channel-market-fit.
He IS a good fit if you need to:
Design and ship new products from scratch
Explore new product directions and assess whether a pivot is necessary
Redesign marketing sites and workflows to drive user growth
Design complex features that impact product and operations
He is NOT a good fit if you need to:
Transform existing designs into a design system
Add a new page to a marketing site
Make small upgrades to a product
Want an intro to Cassius? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
He was gracious enough to share some pro tips with us here ✨
Flow with the river
The best early-stage startup advice I’ve received is to view market forces like rivers.
Find a market flowing towards your vision and build the perfect boat for that river. If you want to change your destination or boat, pick a different river.
I learned this firsthand at Mora.com. We aimed to reverse chronic disease. We had a great product and a killer business model. But there was a problem. Our acquisition costs were sky high, $800, 500% more than industry benchmarks.
To fix this, we conducted countless user interviews, customer calls, and A/B tests. We eventually realized that we weren't following market forces. Our customers were actually more interested in losing weight than becoming healthier. We weren’t in the right river.
With this new insight, we changed our messaging, designs, and workflows to align with market forces. In a few weeks, our CAC dropped over $600 to 30% below industry benchmarks. We saved money by flowing with the river while still achieving our vision and goals.
Find ways to borrow trust to fuel growth
Growth requires trust. In the beginning, you have to borrow trust. No one knows who you are and customers don't care what you do. You can have a beautiful design, excellent value proposition, and fancy copy, but none of that matters unless people trust you.
Borrowing trust is like a social pyramid. The first beta users for a product are usually people in your network. Why? Because they trust you. They give you testimonials and feedback, and you use their social proof to find people outside your network. Eventually, you use this early traction to raise money. Each new level of trust brings more growth.
At Mora.com, we followed this process. We started with friends and family users. We used their testimonials to recruit new users. We used these signals to raise $6.5M in seed funding, bring on a medical co-founder, and partner with doctors to scale our go-to-market strategies.
Borrowing trust sounds obvious, but I see two common mistakes.
First, it’s easy to assume you have enough trust and that there’s an end to this process. No matter where you are in your startup’s lifecycle, there’s always a way to borrow more trust to increase reach and conversion rates. Trust is one of the few intangible commodities with no upper limit, with low-diminishing returns.
The second big mistake is to borrow the wrong trust for your audience.
Think back to Salesforce’s Matthew McConaughey ads, or Coinbase’s Superbowl ads. Do you feel these trust investments were the right investments? There’s no obvious answer here. What matters is how you think about and analyze the process. At the end of the day, the numbers will tell you whether you were right or wrong.
Transform learning into alignment
As an early-stage startup founder, you constantly learn new things about your customers, culture, product, and team. You must transform these learnings into actionable snippets that align your team.
In the early days, water cooler conversations and all-hands meetings may work to align small teams. But over time, casually passed information leads to confusion and uncertain team priorities. To solve this, I like to use KPIs and flywheels.
KPIs sound obvious and mechanical, but they’re a great way to turn your learnings into future actions.
At Mora, we learned that to get one customer, we needed four leads. We also learned that the faster we called a lead, the better the conversion rate. So, we made time to call a KPI. This simple insight, translated into a KPI, drove tons of alignment. No fancy documentation was needed.
Flywheels are another powerful tool to visualize processes that drive growth or improve operations. At Mora, we had a great flywheel to describe how treatment plans led to results, results led to referrals, and referrals led to better program adherence. You can see a lightweight example with some key metrics below.
This flywheel made everyone's life easier because it was clear what to focus on. What speeds up the flywheel? What kills the flywheel?
Flywheels should be created with input from your whole team. Often a simple diagram is best to drive alignment, no crazy documentation is required.
Want an intro to Cassius? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Cassius!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
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