Andy Budd: The Growth Equation

Andy Budd is a designer, entrepreneur, and investor making waves with his new book, The Growth Equation. With a background in UX design, web standards, and startup advising, Andy now helps founders navigate the complex world of venture funding and product growth.

Listen as we explore Andy’s journey from building one of the first UX agencies in the UK to shaping the next generation of startups at Seedcamp. He shares invaluable insights on avoiding the Field of Dreams fallacy, mastering go-to-market strategies, and why a great product isn’t enough—you need to know how to sell it.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.

Amy: Andy Budd is a designer, entrepreneur, and investor who's now making waves with his new book, The Growth Equation. Andy's focus is on helping startups navigate the tricky path to success. His insights cut through the noise, especially when it comes to why so many great products fail.

Andy: A lot of startups die. They die not because the product isn't good, but because they're not able to market it. The founders are not able to connect the value it purports to deliver with enough people in the right way. 

Amy: Join me as we trace Andy's journey from building websites to shaping the next generation of startups. And explore essential ideas from The Growth Equation that could make or break your [00:01:00] business.

So welcome Andy to the Getting2Alpha podcast. 

Andy: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invite. Obviously been following your career and your work for many years. And so it's lovely to have an opportunity to hang out and chat and catch up. So, yeah, thank you. 

Amy: Exactly. So let's start by winding it back to when you first got involved in UX and design. So everybody gets propelled into their career through their personal experiences. So how did you get started? And then what were the key pivot points that led you to where you are now? I'd love to just draw a thread through your journey so we all understand the perspective that you're coming from.

Andy: Yeah, I'm more than happy to share my superhero or super villain backstory. I'm of a vintage whereby web design wasn't really a thing at university. And so I, like many people of my age that got into tech through more of a hobbyist [00:02:00] background.

When I was a little kid, I was the first kid in my neighborhood to get computer, a Spectrum 48k. And back in the day, showing how old I am, like you used to get tapes that you would copy off your friends, or you'd get like a magazine where you would literally hand code games and play them in the evening.

My, my school had a BBC basic, a BBC micro rather. And while everyone else was running around outside kicking balls and growing social skills, me and three or four of my friends were sat inside at lunchtime, playing on their computer and driving a little turtle pen plotter around a map.

 If you think of like Stranger Things kids. You know, playing Dungeons and Dragons and messing around on their computers. That was definitely me. But I didn't realize that you could actually get into an industry in this.

After university, I went traveling around the world. And two things happened while I was traveling that really showed me that there was an opportunity. The first thing happened is I was in a. In a cyber cafe in Indonesia, and I was doing my hotmail like everybody else, like chatting to my friends and [00:03:00] the person sat next to me wasn't a hotmail, which was really weird.

Andy: They were on this black and white screen with angle brackets and code. And it was really mysterious. And as they got up to walk off, I summoned up the courage and said, excuse me, what are you doing? And they said, Oh, I'm building a webpage. And this isn't sound really crazy now, but at the time, this was a mind blowing thing.

Like, I just assumed that in order to build anything with technology, you had to be a big company. You had to have loads of resources. And I was fascinated. This person was traveling around the world before the term blogging was invented, basically taking photos, scanning them in, talking about their travels and really like a proto travel blog.

And so part of my mind was thinking, Hey, next time I go back home after my travels, I might learn how to do this because it'd be a fun and efficient way of capturing my travels rather than writing in a diary. 

The second thing that happened was that I was in a a hostel in Singapore and I chatted to this guy and this guy was saying, I'm a web designer.

And again, I was like, What's that? I've not heard the term before. And this person basically said, well, hey, look, I've learned this thing called HTML. It's really easy. [00:04:00] Any idiot could do it. And I work in London for six months of the year and I get paid a ton of money and I travel for six months. And I was like, wow, this is my perfect lifestyle.

Again, before the trend of remote working was a thing, I thought I'll do this. 

And so I came back to the UK. A Pentium 486 computer, I would sit in coffee shops in bookstores every night for like a year or so reading books for free and teach myself to program.

And so I became an early web designer in the late 90s, I guess. At the time to be a web designer, you had to do a bit of everything. So you do a bit of visual design, you do a bit of front end, you do a bit of back end, a bit of sequel. And so it was really a jack of all trades, master of none.

But two things I discovered, first of all, I remember many years ago reading this article about this new technology called CSS, and it was so new that there was no browser that supported it, but I found it really fascinating, this idea of separation of style from present of presentation from content.

I thought this is fascinating. And so I started noodling [00:05:00] around and. When the very first browser that supported CSS came out, I think it was IE 5. 2 for Mac created by my now friend Tantek Celek amongst many other people, I created what turned out to be the third ever pure CSS website in the whole of Europe.

So I got a bit of a name for doing CSS, I actually ended up going on called CSS Mastery, which sold about half a million copies, which is all about early stage CSS. And so that's how I got really into the web and got well known. And I was speaking at conferences like South by Southwest and for many years, like riding this sort of web standards wave.

When I came around to starting my agency I thought about making it a CSS agency, but I just thought, this is going to be like just the way all websites are gonna be built eventually. So it felt like a very reductive thing to do. 

But at the time I was doing this other thing, which didn't really have a name, I was doing, you know, where most people in the web were just like opening up Photoshop and making things look pretty.

I would go and do research. I'd talk to customers. I would create site maps to plan out how the site would work. I do controlled vocabularies and information architecture. I do [00:06:00] usability testing. And early sort of noughties, I discovered this company in San Francisco called Adaptive Path.

And they described this approach as like UX design. They were like the first UX design agency in maybe in the world, definitely in North America. And I thought that's it, like that's the combination of all the things I love. I'm going to pull that together. And so I started an agency in the UK, which was arguably the first UX agency in the called Clear Left, which I ran for sort of 15 years.

And so That's probably the good point to stop, like my story into the startup and tech and UX and design world. 

Amy: I love that. So you really come out of a combo of design and development. Design is completely attached to development. 

Andy: Back then, that was everybody. Everybody was a hobbyist. It was a bit like being a CB radio fan. You had to learn how to build your radio before you could use the radio. Like, in order to be a designer, you had to build the website in order to design it. So it was all one. And then what happened is the [00:07:00] industry turned from being a hobbyist thing to being a professional thing.

You started seeing these expertise branch out. You know, very quickly, I went from doing everything to realizing, Hey, look, PHP isn't my bag. SQL isn't my bag. Writing code wasn't my thing. And so I branched into design and then design got more specific. And it was like, well, actually I'm doing UX design.

I'm not doing the UI stuff anymore. I'm doing research and AI and all this stuff. And then specialized even more into interaction design. And so, now jump forward 15, 20 years and there's weirdly we've almost come full circle because I think all of these disciplines have weirdly disappeared and we come back to this sort of idea of the single lone product designer.

So you've gone from web designer to tons and tons of specialities back to product designer again, which I think is a fascinating full circle to some extent. 

Amy: Totally. We should actually come back to that full circle at the end of the interview. So, I got to know you when you were running Clear Left and you've transitioned into [00:08:00] advisor, investor, speaker.

Well, you've always been a speaker. And I'd like to dig into your perspective as an investor and really see if we can look at startups through an investor's eyes. through your eyes, given your path, and then dig into your book and really talk about some of the cornerstones of growth that you put in place.

So first briefly, because I know there's probably a long story, but how did you make the transition to investor? You're now with Seedcamp, which is a very prominent seed investor.

Andy: I feel very lucky. Yeah I landed on my feet in the venture fund space. Like Seacamp are probably one of the top three pre seed and seed stage funds in Europe. So we've got a really good reputation, probably the most like unicorn startups than anybody else in our space, again, it started through the agency world.

Like I was running UX London. Like at the time, like there wasn't really much of a startup community in the UK, all of the startup epicenter was in [00:09:00] California, really, but there was this one organization called C camp who, one of the first venture funds. And so I got to know them really well.

I used to come and mentor with their portfolio companies, they used to come and speak at their events. And so I got to know the GPs, the general partners really well. And it started just as a friendship and we didn't do any work together. You know, most of the people that were running startups didn't want to hire agencies.

We were mostly working with bigger brands like Virgin Atlantic. Big utilities, big universities, big tech companies. When I left ClearLeft, so my agency ran for about 15 years before I sold it. We went and became a employee owned company. So the company is still going, but it's now run and owned by all of the staff, which I think is a great story.

In and of itself, I reached out to the C camp founders mostly just to chat, and they were like, well, hey Andy, we know that you are really passionate about product. We know that you've been a founder yourself. I run a couple of small startups. Why don't you come and just do some advisory work?

You're not doing anything at the moment. We can't pay you, but just do a day, a month and see how it goes. And [00:10:00] so I started just helping out, occasionally. You know, talking to some of the founders, helping them guide them on their journey. There's a lot of things that are similar, the challenges that I faced, building a team, deciding what roles you hire and how you build culture in a business. 

Being a founder, I knew about sales and marketing and pitching and growing revenue, obviously being a CEO you learn how to read the books and to read accounts and to manage across a whole range of different disciplines. You learn how to build culture because building culture is a big part of having a successful business.

So all of the sort of business side of things I was able to help these founders with. And at the same time, because I come from a product background, like. What is the main thing that a lot of founders is trying to do with trying to get their product into the market? They're trying to breathe life into it.

And so figuring out how to do research figuring out how to prototype figuring out how to do MVPs and then figuring out how to validate your ideas and how to build a team, how to [00:11:00] figure out your backlog and how you decide what you're going to prioritize All of this stuff in the route for product market fit So how do you get to a point where you build a product that has such an efficient value delivery system that your users just start loving it and keep coming back for more and start telling their friends.

And so these are all things that had a ton of experience here. 

And so I just started advising in this casual basis. And after six months or so, when the sort of the the program was up, I was and EIR, an entrepreneur in residence, the founder, Carlos, the GP, just came back to me and said, look, Andy, people are loving working with you.

People are getting so much value. They're really finding your input. Useful. Do you want to come and do something a bit more serious? Do you want to come and become a partner? Do you want to do a venture partner role a couple of days a week? A paid role comes with carry and part of the team, part of the investment team, a team of sort of nine or 10 investors. And so that's what I do now. I'm still very much involved in supporting the founders we've invested in. So 70 percent of my [00:12:00] time is probably post investment support. I've got a a portfolio of about a dozen founders that I look after on a regular basis and help them navigate the sort of the rocky early few years of being a founder.

And then about 30 percent of my time is pre investment. So having opinions around what It's happening in the market trends and patterns of portfolio creation. I sit in, you know, a couple of pitches a week to judge whether we think the people who are pitching to us are worth investing in and then discuss with the team.

And so I love being that part of it. I wouldn't want to just be purely investment. I think I'd get bored really quickly if I was doing 100% pre investment stuff. You know, there's a lot of due diligence. There's a lot of legal staff and so the balance, I think is it right, 30 percent pre investment? But 70 percent really advising those founders on what to do. 

Amy: Sounds like a lot of fun. So let's do some green flag, red flag, cause that's super useful to founders who are looking for funding. Start off with as an [00:13:00] investor watching pitches, what are some of the green flag signals that make you lean forward and go maybe, Ooh, I want to hear more.

Andy: I might caveat this a little bit, which is I think that most founders believe that the reason they get investment or not is purely in the quality of the idea of the product. And this makes sense because a lot of the stories you tell are all the founder stories around like this was a great product.

This was a bad product. A lot of this is around the output. That's often also because at the end of the day, that's the thing people can see. It's the thing they can touch. But I think this is a myth. I think the product has to be a good, it has to be amazing. You know, I come from a product and design background.

That's one of my superpowers that I bring to my fund and bring to the founders I support, like knowing what good looks like. But there's so much more to a successful product than just the product itself. A big thing that I think a lot of VCs look for is the quality of the founding team, because the reality [00:14:00] is that like a good 50 percent of the ideas that I invest in, by the time they come around to raising the next round, the idea is pivoted. They maybe have changed TAC in terms of their market. They might have changed TAC in terms of their ICP. They might have fundamentally reinvented the product. And so very rarely is the product the thing that is the defining factor.

Actually, the space is often more interesting than the product itself. 

But what you're looking for is you're looking for founders that have grit, have determination, have hustle, have background, have network. You know, I meet lots of amazing, talented product builders who don't have any experience in the space they're working in, and that can be fine.

But it can be really challenging if they're trying to make those early deals, because the early deals you make as a founder are often made out of your network. It's unsurprising that a lot of early stage founders want to sell to other early stage founders, because that's who their network are. They've got 10, 000 followers on social media, and all of them are people like them.

A big [00:15:00] part of it is figuring out what the character of the founder is, what their background is, what their network is. And so that's a big green flag as you put it. 

Amy: Right. It's interesting. That echoes what we've heard from Many early stage investors that you're not really investing in the idea, but in the team and in specifically in the founder. So let's also talk about red flags. So you're in a meeting, you're listening to pitches.

You do this now for a living and you see something. And instead of leaning forward, you start leaning back. You're like maybe not. I was into it, but maybe not. What are some of those signals that are red flags for you?

Andy: I mean, again, it's interesting. I tend to be more relativistic than absolute. So I tend not to think in terms of red flags, as in, this is an absolute no, no. Whenever somebody pitches a slide or a thing they say will start a cascade of questions you have in your mind. 

And a really good pitch, the next slide [00:16:00] answers those questions and then it creates a whole bunch more and then the slide after that answers those questions. And ideally what you want as a founder is the end of the pitch, you've asked and answered all the questions. So at the end of the day, you come to a really nice summary.

We're almost like the founder, sorry, almost the VC. Can't, not invest because they don't have any get out clause. They don't have any things that I'm in and I'm in about, like, you've covered all the bases, whereas the bad pitches are ones where they ask a whole bunch of open questions and don't answer them.

And then you overwhelm the investor. With so many different directions they could take that they're never going to be able to close down in a meeting or two meetings or 10 meetings that the space feels so unanswered and so chaotic that they get nervous and they back out.

And so I think it's really around crafting a good narrative or crafting a really bad chaotic narrative. So that's the one element. 

One of the things that I really focus on is go-to-market [00:17:00] strategy, because I have no doubt that these people that I'm talking to are passionate individuals that know the space really well, they've got an amazing vision for how their product is going to be different. What they often struggle to tell me is how they are going to bring that to market. 

The weird thing I find as a VC, like if you're a founder, you believe that your product is so unique that it's never been seen before in the world. And as I said before, you're trying to push this idea that like, well, we get a win because the product is amazing.

The weird thing as a VC is you start seeing the same product appear every six months. And so your mindset isn't, is this product any good? Your mindset is like, oh, this product again, that's interesting. And then you start thinking, well, why now? Like, why is this time the right time for this product to work rather than six months ago or in six months time?

And actually VCs are weirdly, even though we work in this sort of innovation space, we're weirdly conservative. And so [00:18:00] if you think, well, maybe if I wait six months time. A better product will come along or a better version of this product will come along your way. And so you need to convince people why now.

And going back to the team thing, you also need to convince people why this team. If you have a team that have built products before, you've had successful exits before, you've worked in this space before, you know all the right people. As a VC, you start thinking, well, clearly this team is connected.

They're not going to have any problem getting their first 10 or 100 customers. They're not going to have any problems understanding the space. Whereas if it's a group of people that have never worked in this space before, they're just like, Hey, wouldn't it be cool to do this? That starts to be a little bit of a concern because you're like, well, these people might have a brilliant product idea, but are they actually going to be able to sell it?

And that's one of the things I find that a lot of startups die. They die not because the product isn't good, but because they're not able to market it. The founders are not able to connect the value it purports to deliver with enough people in the right way. And so I think not having a good go-to-market strategy and not having a [00:19:00] team that can demonstrate their knowledge of go-to-market strategy, I think is always a thing that makes me sit up and go, okay, there might be an issue here. And yeah, no, I could wait for another six months and a better team might come along. So yeah, you really got to prove that to me. 

Amy: That's a great segue into talking about your book. So you recently put a lot of what you've learned into this book, The Growth Equation.

I have a list of specific topics I want to dig into. Let's go ahead and start with go-to-market. So, as you're coaching teams about go-to-market, what are the cornerstones that you make sure they understand and get right? What are the things that if they didn't do those, nothing else matters?

Andy: I tend to find that there are two archetypal. One archetypal founder is the business entrepreneurial person. They might have run a significant sort of [00:20:00] department in a bigger company, their marketers, their sales people, their pitch people, their rainmakers, they get the go-to-market stuff really well.

And so we don't need to worry about them. 

The other founders, the more classic Silicon Valley founder, the engineer, the product person, the visionary, and they are all about building the best product possible. They're all about trying to build a 10X product. And they have a couple of fundamental flaws.

The first flaw, which I talk about in this book, is this idea of the field of dreams fallacy. If you build it, they will come. As a designer, I'm really seduced by that fallacy. The idea that all I need to do is build the best product possible. And then I put it out in the market and people will discover it.

And they will discover it and they will love it and they will share it with their friends and suddenly the product will be amazing. And this is a really ego driving belief because it's all around our baby, you know, we've built an amazing product and of course, why wouldn't the world love it?

It's also doubled down by a lot of the myth that you see, these sort [00:21:00] of founders that defy convention and put a product out there and it explodes overnight. The irony is that most overnight successes were four or five years in the making. And we tend to tell an oversimplified story that often focuses on a few product features and doesn't tell the deeper story.

A lot of these sort of product builders, they are anti go-to-market. The engineering and product people often really hate the idea of sales. It makes them feel really awkward. It makes them feel really icky. They often have almost like a moral aversion to sales. You know, a lot of these people feel that sales is trying to convince people to buy stuff that they don't want and they don't need. And their whole mission is to build stuff that naturally sells itself. This idea of don't make people want products, make products that people want.

And so there's a real aversion to sales. Same with marketing. You know, like, I shouldn't have to go and tell the world about this thing. It should be self evident. And so I see time and time again, amazing products launch that wither on the vine, [00:22:00] while more mediocre products survive and thrive. And it's often because the founder has shied away from really engaging go-to-market, they've shied away from doing sales, they've shied away from sending out emails, of contacting their friends on LinkedIn, of doing really basic stuff like going to conferences where you're Your customers hang out and talking to them, but these are all the things entrepreneurs do.

And these are all the things you need to do to land your first 10, a hundred, a thousand customers. Once you've got things going, once you've got your 10 or a hundred customers, you can then hire a sales team, hire a marketing team, do it yourself. But a big part of the book is if you want to have a successful business, you have to lean into the things that are maybe a little bit awkward and you don't like, and sales and marketing are definitely part of that.

I'm a big fan of product led growth. Don't get me wrong. A big part of the book is about singing the praises of product led growth. I think it's an amazing thing, but product led growth typically doesn't work in the early stages. Because in order to have product led [00:23:00] growth, you have to have found product market fit.

You have to have a good product. And in those first couple of years, you probably don't have that good product. And so for the first couple of years, all of your growth is coming from that personal effort. And it's only once you reach product market fit, does product led growth really kick in.

And so talking about red flags, when I see pitches where people say, Oh yeah, we'll just do product led growth. That for me is almost like underpants known. I'm sure you're all aware of the classic episode of South Park where the underpants moms exposed their strategy. And the strategy is collect underpants, question mark profit.

And I see so many decks where basically it's equivalent underpants knowns where, build amazing product, something happens, profit. And it's that something happens. It's that question mark in the middle, which is really important to understand, to get right, to flesh out. And so that's what I'm looking for. And that's why I think most people go wrong. 

Amy: Got it. So I think you're part of a wave of voices all over the world that are emphasizing [00:24:00] sell your product even before you build it.

Make sure that sales is built in to your development process, your go-to-market, your validation process, etc. So your voice I feel like there's a rising tide and you're at the forefront of it, 

but a part of sales gets into really specific tactics like pricing. And I know that's something that you've dealt with and you dig into. So can you give us some of what you've learned about how you figure out. pricing, both early on and then later, because it's probably going to change. How can we as founders get better at that? 

Andy: There's a whole chapter in the book on pricing. So, go and have a look at that. Most of my startup work is really early stages, I said, sort of pre seed, series A, usually pre product market fit. . And I think before you found product market fit, my big advice would be don't obsess around pricing too much.

I meet [00:25:00] so many founders who think that pricing is the most important thing. They've got to get the pricing right. They've got to get the tiers right. And they obsess over this stuff. And the time to optimize your pricing is once you've got a product that is really flying. Before that it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if you're leaving 10 percent on the table or 20 percent on the table. Actually, in a way, you might want to choose a strategy of like penetration pricing where you have a slightly cheaper offering or a slightly unusual way of pricing in order to start getting those early customers in and building out your logos and your case studies.

So I wouldn't obsess over pricing too much. Basically as long as you've got a price and people are seemingly willing to pay it, you're good. And if you start having lots of conversations and people are really uncomfortable around your pricing, then you might need to go back to it.

I think pricing for me, is something that a lot of us are really nervous about. I think particularly in America, Americans are taught maybe and [00:26:00] Brits as well, to talking about money might feel a little bit awkward, a little bit of like a taboo. So often we don't even think about pricing. 

When we're doing research, we talk about features. We talk about competitors. We never just ask the question. We're like, you know, What are some of the other products that you pay for and how much do you pay? Just asking a simple question around that can give an understanding of people's propensity to buy.

Another classic is this idea of the van who's drop, I'm probably going to get that wrong, pricing model where you basically ask people, what would you think would be too cheap a price to pay for this product that you wouldn't trust it? Because a lot of people worry about too expensive, but something is so cheap, you know, that people like, oh, this can't be good quality.

Then you might ask, well, what would be a price point at which would be a little bit painful to pay for, but you'd still be happy to pay for it? And what would be a price where it would be? Far too expensive. And so there's some techniques you can use in your research to eke this out. 

One of my favorite techniques, again, which I talk about in the book is the door slam pricing model, where you give people a [00:27:00] ridiculous price.

You know, that they're almost going to say like, no, that's crazy. Like they're used to paying 20 pound a seat and, or 20 a seat and you say, well, our product is 1,000 a seat. Now that's great because they're going to immediately throw up their hands and go, well, this is crazy. I'd never pay for that.

But then you ask them, well, what would the product need to do in order to be worth that? And then they start getting into it. They go, well, okay to be worth 1,000, it would need to do A, B, C, D, E. And they start listing these things off. And often you'll find, well, actually., It doesn't do C and D, but it does A and B.

So, you know, how about 500? So, there's loads of techniques, like I say, go to the book, but I think don't start optimizing your pricing until a little bit later. And I think actually that comes across in pitch decks as well. I see so many early stage pre seed and seed companies that put far too much effort on their pricing and not on their go-to-market.

Pricing is usually important. You want to have an operating model, probably when you're raising series A or series B, but I think in the early [00:28:00] stages, maybe don't worry about it too much. 

Amy: Awesome. So something that you go into that I relate to because it really overlaps with our own approach and point of view is, language market fit and the power of getting your mental models from your customers, not just from your team. Can you expand on that? Maybe tell a story.

Andy: Absolutely. I mean, I think this is a real recurring problem. As I said before, a lot of founders are in love with their own product. They're in love with their baby. And they assume that all they need to do is like offer their baby up to the world and the world will immediately see why their child is better than all the other children in school.

And so they get really frustrated when people come to the website and don't understand, like, why is this any different from anything else? That people will sign up and use the product for a couple of weeks and then churn. There's this real lack of understanding because the founder has lived with [00:29:00] this thing so much and has convinced themselves that their idea is perfect.

I often see it in sales calls or in research calls where the person they're talking to will start saying, Oh, your products a bit like X and the founder always goes and corrects him. Oh no, it's nothing like X, because we do these 15 tiny niche largely relevant things that X doesn't do. And then the audience will go, Oh, is it a little bit like a mashup between X and Y and whatever the person says to explain their mental model understanding of the product, the founder often corrects them and tells them they're wrong.

They don't know what they're talking about. Their product is so much bigger and different and more nuanced. And that can really get people's backs up. It's not deliberate. It's not intentional. But often what happens is the founder is trying to convince them of the founder's worldview.

 In order to get product market fit, in order to get a product that people are going to be using, you need to get them to try the product. 

In order to try the product need to understand what it is. [00:30:00] In order to understand what it is, you need to find this thing which I talk about called language marketing, which is not trying to sell your product in your language or in these big buzzwordy marketingy, you know, we leverage data from a multi connected AI driven world and people are like, I don't know what that means. You need to listen to what your customers are talking about.

You need to listen to the analogies and similes and concepts they use. And you need to lean into that and you need to find the right language, not based on what you want them to think about, but how they view the world. And if you can do that, and if you can do that effectively. You know, this is kind of positioning. This is value prop. 

If you can talk to people in a way that they go, I get what this is. And not only do I get what this is, I can see how this could be really useful. That's when they'll give you a try. 

And so, I meet so many customers, so many founders rather, that are like weirdly have got a great product but haven't found language market fit and are probably never going to find language market fit because they don't even [00:31:00] realize that's a problem. 

And all they do is keep throwing more features at the situation and actually, weirdly, the proposition gets even more muddled because it's just a grab bag of Swiss army knife of things.

And so, yeah, a lot of my work is trying to get people to really think about how their users see themselves 

and this is comes back from design. You know, like I am a designer, I am trained to think about how my customers, my users see the world. It's sort of empathy. It's user experience.

It's HCI psychology. And a lot of founders are seeing the world through this more logical, mechanical, engineering, feature set driven mindset and trying to get them to think differently. A lot of founders think that marketing and branding and positioning is just like buzzwords useful for big companies and it's not useful for a startup, but I think they're so wrong. And so that's a big area of opportunity I see. 

Amy: Where can folks, reach out to you [00:32:00] for further convo? 

Andy: Blue Sky is probably the best, you know, social media. I'm a social media person. So direct contact is probably easier through social media.

Amy: andybud.com is my blog. That's probably what you're asking. If you go to andybud.com slash book, you can see all the links to where to get the book. You can get it on Amazon, but you can also get it on a whole bunch of independent stores there as well. There's a contact form if you want to chat.

Andy: LinkedIn again, like I tend to keep LinkedIn connections with people I know, but follow me on LinkedIn, pop up and say hi. Comment on the occasional thing I say. But yeah, that's probably what you're after, I guess. 

Amy: thank you for your time, Andy, and for sharing your hard won wisdom with us. Really appreciate it.

Andy: Thank you for inviting me, 

Amy: Awesome. Take care, everyone.

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting[number]2alpha.com for more great [00:33:00] resources and podcast episodes.