The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:45:26 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:45:26] S0: which... So you said counter positioning twice. I love Seven Powers. And so, like, for me, it's, like, you know Yeah. Incredibly exciting. But what is counter positioning first? [00:45:35] S1: Counter positioning is where you take what someone else's, like, core messaging or core positioning in the market, and you take the exact opposite, and you use that as your strength rather than your weakness. And so the example with Brex is Brex really stood for, like, hey. Spend as much money on your card as possible. We give you all these fantastic points, and it's kind of like, look how many, like, extra points and rewards and stuff we're giving. And then Ramp took the exact opposite approach, which was, hey. We're not gonna give you any points. Points are a waste of money. Points you end up spending on stupid things. Instead, we're going to pump that all back into software. As soon as they made points an actual bad thing and got the whole market to think about points being bad. Let's use it to invest in great software and the focus instead being on saving money and almost reducing the number of these imaginary points you're getting. They were really well counter positioned to basically every time Brex would do something, they'd be able to riff off the other way. [00:46:29] S0: I'm just thinking how we could use counter positioning effectively. Yes. I'm just, like, in a world of, like, really long podcasts with, like, three and a half hours of Joe Rogan pontificating about, you know, planetary [00:46:39] S1: Yes.
00:46:39 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:46:39] S1: Yes. [00:46:39] S0: Evolution. You could do, like, a three minute episode. You know what I mean? Like, just the best bit. Yeah. [00:46:45] S1: Well, I think you did that right from this... You were 20 VC. You were short. You were concise. You were counter positioned at the start. The interesting thing is you're now kind of the incumbent, and people have moved on or not moved on. [00:46:56] S0: But... No. Totally. The amount the amount of people I get that message me, like, we're gonna start the nineteen minute VC. [00:47:02] S1: Yes. Yeah. [00:47:02] S0: Yeah. And then you could keep going. I'll do the eighteen. Like, you know? [00:47:06] S1: I saw one great example recently was the... I think it's t p n... The new tech... [00:47:12] S0: TBPN. Yeah. [00:47:13] S1: Yes. Terrible name, but great content. And they were like... [00:47:16] S0: Okay. So this is interesting. Yes. And I'm gonna get in trouble for this, but fuck it. I think it's Clubhouse of our era. So they have a brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all. But they have brilliant, and this is not a criticism, they crush channel market fit. They have brilliant for Twitter for certain types of videos, but they also do volume. Yep. It's a spray game. Clubhouse.
00:47:16 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:47:16] S0: Okay. So this is interesting. Yes. And I'm gonna get in trouble for this, but fuck it. I think it's Clubhouse of our era. So they have a brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all. But they have brilliant, and this is not a criticism, they crush channel market fit. They have brilliant for Twitter for certain types of videos, but they also do volume. Yep. It's a spray game. Clubhouse. [00:47:50] S1: We will see. I think they're still evolving what their actual product is, but they found this, as you said, like channel fit. And to jump back to the counter positioning, they've done the really... The funky thing of they're like, okay. They've counter positions against All In, where All In was like no ads. They're like, we're gonna be all ads. And they're like, TechCrunch is going more the vibe or maybe not TechCrunch, but traditional media is going more the vibe of being, like, anti tech. They're like, no. We're going to be completely pro tech. Others are going like, oh, we're only polished, button up, the clean cuts. They're like, no. We're going to be, like, streaming live content, the raw stuff. So...
00:47:50 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:47:50] S1: We will see. I think they're still evolving what their actual product is, but they found this, as you said, like channel fit. And to jump back to the counter positioning, they've done the really... The funky thing of they're like, okay. They've counter positions against All In, where All In was like no ads. They're like, we're gonna be all ads. And they're like, TechCrunch is going more the vibe or maybe not TechCrunch, but traditional media is going more the vibe of being, like, anti tech. They're like, no. We're going to be completely pro tech. Others are going like, oh, we're only polished, button up, the clean cuts. They're like, no. We're going to be, like, streaming live content, the raw stuff. So... [00:48:23] S0: And, also, they're, like, smartly dressed. Smart, yeah yeah No tech bro hoodies and stuff. They're like shirts and they look really formal. I think they've been really smart. So I didn't mean that as a takedown, but I think it's interesting. Dude, we were breaking down the teams earlier. You have a weird element, which is... And you said this to me before, you don't have PMs. Yes. Wait. Why? Explain this to me. This is like the holy grail of product teams, don't it? [00:48:48] S1: And for context, Harry asked me this in front of an audience of about ninety seconds. PMs. Do you remember PMs. Yeah. Yeah. [00:48:54] S0: You guys raised your hand, and it was like,
00:48:57 · Luke Harries
[00:48:57] S1: oh god. So the reason we don't have PMs is our overall thesis is that engineers are building the product, and they should be responsible for the product. And with AI now, we're seeing much more like different traditional roles merging. And so engineers are going towards product engineers or engineers towards growth engineers. And what's fantastic is when you have product engineers and the engineers who are actually building the product, they own the road map, they can go from idea, and chances are their ideas are better and more right because they're the ones speaking to users and understand the context. So they can have better ideas. They then ship the product. They then get the results and analyze them, and they do that entire loop without needing anyone's else permission or anyone to slow them down. So that's why I think the ideal setup is engineers own the product and they're responsible for it. Now we then, instead of having PMs or a separate marketing function, which is kind of like three separate functions, engineering product marketing, instead, we merge a lot of product with a lot of marketing and called that growth. And most of the team actually is ex PMs who are now doing growth, and so they're responsible for all the marketing as well. And so now each different product has an engineering lead, is responsible for how great is the product overall, and they partner with the growth lead, which is responsible for particularly the awareness, the acquisition, and then they collab on the activation and retention pieces.
00:50:25 · Harry Stebbings
[00:50:25] S0: How do you prevent the growth role, which is a lot former PMs, just slipping into a PM role again and trying to actively manage product and kind of over engineer with the engineers?