A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:41:04 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:41:04] S2: Oh yes, right. [00:41:04] S0: Yeah, HARO, Help a Reporter Out. I think is what it's called. You've got platforms like this, you've got syndication platforms, you've got social media. You could literally scrape and cold email every single reporter in the world, and it doesn't take long. [00:41:17] S2: Is it a numbers game or is it a quality game? Like invest, if you think about a founder. Invest a lot of time in having just a great piece and then that’ll get published or just keep churning out things. Email one hundred people every time and cross your fingers, like what’s the model?
00:41:30 · Dan Mishin
[00:41:30] S0: I think it depends on the stage. I think the first P zero is understand the psychology of a user. Every market is different. There's no generic advice. If you understand the psychology of a user, try to solve their pain point with whatever content you're building. In our experience, there was this piece around every year, sorry, every month, US Department of State publishes what's called a visa bulletin and a visa bulletin determines how long it will take for you to get your green card. The way they publish this is so confusing. It's so freaking hard to understand. It's insane, you've got spreadsheets with numbers. It's impossible to understand it. Instead of writing, and every single media piece about that topic was like just same tables and slightly prettier designs. There was no first principles thinking and the first principles thinking is like, I don't freaking understand this table in the first place. You build a simple PLG led growth where you're saying, here's a calculator, enter your nationality, enter where you're from, and basically enter a date. And that spits out an answer for you. You don't need to look at the spreadsheet. You just need an answer to a fundamental question, and again, it's so basic. I'm embarrassed to even make this as an example. But, people don't ask themselves first principles questions. What's best for the user? What's best for the reader? And what's best for the reader is usually not what's best for Google Search Engine anymore. So, I think the superpower that we have at ManifestOS is really two things and we suck at so many things. But there are two things that we're probably good at. One is we're deeply focused on this market. We're not boiling the ocean. We're not going after fifteen practice areas at the same time. We picked one, we stuck with one, and we just went hyper deep, and we built such a nuanced expertise that there's nobody who understands this space better than us. And I'm very confident in saying this on every level of the company. And the second piece is we basically asked ourselves a lot of first principles, user behavior based questions. And people miss this all the time. I interviewed the fanciest marketers from the fanciest companies with the best degrees in the world who totally fail in understanding user psychology.
00:43:26 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:43:26] S2: Perfect. Well, Dan, I think that's a perfect place to end it, man. Thanks so much for jumping on the show, dude. It’s been great. [00:43:30] S0: That was a lot of fun. [00:43:32] S2: Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.