🌱 5 new insights for product builders (#81)
Doing sales with no experience; Sell features, not benefits; Failure modes of first-time founders; Writing great job ads; and be careful believing people want to solve their problem
Jaryd here! 👋 You’re reading 5-Bit Fridays—your weekly ~5-minute roundup of 5 actionable insights that can help you build and grow your product.
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Friends, Happy Friday! ☕
Today is a special edition, with insights across product, startups, growth, and mistake-making, all from the newsletter. As I said last time, I’ve been reading all their stuff because it’s just that good, and I thought I’d share a few bits from the mountains I’ve been learning from them.
We’ll cover…
How to do sales with no experience
Why you should sell features, not benefits
How first-time founders fail
Nonobvious ways to write great job ads
Avoid this mistake: Believing people want to solve their problem
Let’s do it.
5 big ideas; 5 calls to action
(#1) Selling as a first-time founder is hard, but you are the best salesperson for your product because you get the what and why behind everything. Some advice for founders on how to do the call…
“Don't make it painful for the customer to interact with you. You are leading the meeting because you asked for it, so lead. Start with some friendly rapport, then lay out a plan for the meeting:
"Hey, so there are three things I hope to run through with you in this meeting. First, I want to get a grip on your company and priorities; second, I'd like to cover [X] problem space a bit; third, I want to talk about our product and show you a few relevant bits of it. Is that a good use of the next 25 minutes for you?
Keep the call light hearted, be energetic and funny if you can manage it. You are talking to a human being, not a robot. Gossip about the tech industry, whatever you might have in common.
Introduce yourself properly at the start of the call:
"Hi, I'm James, I'm one of the co-founders, I'm working on [your company] because I kept seeing [the problem you’re solving] in my last company and couldn't help but to go out and solve it! I'm an engineer originally, but here I am doing sales, wish me luck."
Use your lack of sales experience as an advantage. It’s disarming to know you’re dealing with someone who isn’t a sales ninja, and people will appreciate the honesty.
—
🫰 Why it matters: You have one job as a founder: get to product-market fit. Outsourcing your sales will make this harder. You need to be the one in the trenches getting meetings and running sales calls.
🔑 Bottom Line: Using your lack of sales experience can be an advantage, and so can emphasizing that you’re the person who built the actual product. It’s authentic and cool. The key is to own it and try to be confident (even when you’re not). Tone, as James says, is almost more important than what you're saying. Everything you say and do should make the customer confident about working with you.
🥇 Applying it: James lays out some dos and don’t
Go deeper—How to do sales with no experience
Millions of data points in one user session*
🫰 Why it matters: Many product teams either overcomplicate their analysis or make it too simplified. And when it comes to product decisions… what fascinates me is this contrast ↓
🔑 Bottom Line: Millions of data points collected, yet one user's session recording can reveal more than all. The hard part is being able to combine both. That's why I was impressed with how LiveSession approaches this
🥇 Applying it: They've found a way to blend unlimited event tracking inside user session recordings all tied to custom dashboards.
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(#2) When it comes to selling and positioning your products, is traditional product marketing advice, which tells you to focus on the why (the product benefit), and not the what, wrong?
“Marketing lore tells you to focus on the why, not the what. "No one buys a CRM, they buy a way to increase their revenue". I disagree strongly if you are working on a developer-focused product, and perhaps anything.
Why?
Because this language has become so ubiquitous, it feels tired and out of touch.
Developers are especially sensitive to vague language when evaluating products. Hacker News provides a clear example of this – many new startups launch there, and a common criticism is "I have read the homepage and don't know what it does".
I think it's because developers have to figure out how products work, to plug it all in, so details matter. Benefits language makes me feel like I'm being sold to, by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.”
—
🫰 Why it matters: Benefits are why someone would use your product.
Features are what your product does. But benefits-heavy and feature-light language makes it hard to know what you're actually buying. Most things are easy for folks to evaluate for themselves on how something will benefit them if you show what your product does, and how it compares to other products.
🔑 Bottom Line: Generally, users do know the product category they're interested in. If I’m looking at an analytics product, for instance, I know the benefits of using one (hence being in the market). I don’t need to be told the value of understanding users. I want to choose one that suits my team, so here, show me how your features stack up, not how you'll help me "make smarter decisions, faster". Benefits don’t make comparing usefulness easy product, and it can easily come off as manipulative.
🥇 Applying it: Remember The Golden Rule: Customers are smart. Be crystal clear about what your product does, and spend less time trying to woo them with fancy benefits copy.
Go deeper—Why we sell features, not benefits
(#3) There are many failure modes for first-time founders—one of them is cheating your metrics
“Don't be seduced by vanity metrics, like app downloads or signups, that make you feel good. Instead, "find a metric that truly indicates PMF." For Supabase, it's “monthly active databases,” which indicates both growth and real usage.”
—
🫰 Why it matters: Founders are often obsessed with scaling, but expansion is worth nothing without product-market fit. And if you scale prematurely, it’s very easy to get caught up in the whirlpool of vanity metrics that are going up and to the right.
🔑 Bottom Line: Before you spend time thinking about scaling anything and looking at numbers like signups or downloads, you have to know what your special metric is that shows people are getting value. It’s often a % that’s not correlated with your size.
🥇 Applying it: What is your product’s most vital metric that tells you things are really working, even if just for 100 people? Find that, and don’t let other metrics that may be getting better cheat you out of obsessing over that PMF one at all costs.
Go deeper—How first-time founders fail
(#4) Make your job ads more interesting and differentiated—by being very genuine (or even weird)…
“I'm a big believer that a well-written job ad is just as important to your company as a great blog post or homepage copy. Especially if you advertise on LinkedIn, your ad will be seen by thousands of people – potentially more than visit your website every week.”
—
🫰 Why it matters: Job applicants are sometimes reading dozens of ads in the course of their search, so cutting through the noise is really important.
🔑 Bottom Line: Tell a story. Your ads don't have to follow the exact same structure every time – engineers care about different things to designers. Sometimes you will want to get super specific about exactly what you want the person to do. Other times you may have a vague sense, but you need help figuring out the role – both of these are ok, but the ads should be written differently.
🥇 Applying it: Perceived best practice' is to make job specs as short as possible because the internet has wrecked our attention spans, but I think that just optimizes for total application volume over quality. The right candidate will spend lots of time reading and re-reading your spec because it's full of all the things they care about, and in turn, you'll probably get fewer, but higher-quality, applications.
(#5) The road to growth will come with many mistakes; try avoid this one—Believing people want to solve their problem
“Talking to users is hard, especially when you’re trying to validate a problem exists. James and Tim once spent weeks building a tool to solve a problem 15 potential users insisted they had, and enthusiastically wanted to solve. Not a single one even tried the product when it launched.”
—
🫰 Why it matters: If you build what people tell you they want, you can easily end up burning time and resources. Great builders see beyond what people believe they need.
🔑 Bottom Line: Someone admitting they have a problem and them wanting to solve it aren’t the same thing
🥇 Applying it: When talking to users, always ask why they haven’t solved their problem. Some problems are just not important enough for people to solve them. If they’ve never tried anything in the past, there’s a good chance they won’t in the future. Apathy is a bitch.
So much great stuff here from the Product For Engineers newsletter. Keep learning from there here…
3 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑🎓
(1/3) Tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️
I use Open for guided meditations. I like to test new mindfulness apps out, and this is one that’s really been sticking with me. (Learn more)
I use Circeback as my AI notetaking co-pilot. I hardly write notes anymore during meetings, and it’s a beautiful thing. (Learn more)
I use Perplexity as my new defacto search. I very seldom Google something anymore, it all goes into Perplexity. (Learn more)
(2/3) How I can help you grow 🤝
Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗
(3/3) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇
And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.
Otherwise, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd
The fifth insight is 🔥! Sometimes users in interviews say they’re ready to buy, but when it’s go-time, they back out. It’s those classic false positives – they’re all in during the convo, but in the real world, they’re just not. That’s why it’s so important to mix up interviews with real observations and dive into their experience before jumping into product dev. Thanks for calling that out!
Very in-depth stuff thank you very much