Go-to-market models with Maggie Hsu and Pyrs Carvolth

Transcript

[Music] good afternoon everyone uh many of you know me from CSX but for those of you who don't my name is Maggie shoe and I lead go to market for a16z crypto prior to this I was at AWS leading go to market for Amazon's managed blockchain product before that I was an early Business Development hire at a decentralized exchange called air Swap and first became interested in web 3 and blockchain when I was at zaposlite how my name is spelled it's

pronounced Pierce I started my career in traditional Finance trading Equity derivatives which would have been horrifically boring had two things not happened which is I found crypto as a retail Trader and then I was lucky enough to have a mentor who told me to not wake up and be 30 working in finance so I then transitioned into a business development role um at a streaming audio platform called tunin where we negotiated um large platform BD deals with the likes of Amazon Google Tesla and others um I then found my way back to crypto um having most recently spent time at DraftKings which is an online gambling platform where we built a number of crypto products including an nft Marketplace an nft based Fantasy game and uh delved into the world of

Business Development that is particularly unique in web 3 and thinking about IP licensing and B2B um Business Development Integrations and very thankful to have joined Maggie two years ago uh this past April at a16z crypto so I'll let her take it away and you'll see me in a little bit awesome thanks Pierce so today we'll be talking about different types of go to market that are more Web Two like and some that are more web 3 like we'll talk about our goto Market team and how we typically support portfolio companies we'll go through a go market checklists and this is really things that you need before you embark on your go to market journey and then we'll spend the majority of the time doing a deep dive around your messaging do some exercises we'll get some folks up on stage to give their elevator pitches so it'll be a fun

engaging afternoon so what is go to market go to market means different things to different people and it can Encompass many different functions so these are just a few of the functions you might find associated with go to market Business Development sales marketing and growth but at its core go to market is about bringing something and that's something could be a product or a service to Market in web 3 there are a lot of different things you could bring to Market that's something that list is kind of bigger than this this is just a small representation of the different types of business models that you might see so go to market models really depend on two things one is the level of centralization or decentralization of your entity and decentralization could

be on three fronts technical economic and legal and our general counsel miles Jennings has spoken at length about this in Prior talks so highly suggest you watch those the second one is whether or not you have a token and as you guys know from Eddie's talk or CTO uh that can have different go to market motions associated with no token and token so at the end of the day centralized with no token that tends to lend itself more to these Web Two like models decentralized with a token you start to see more web 3 native models so I'll talk through five common go to market motions today and some are more Web Two like others are web 3 native you could actually find these in both and across all of these you can actually layer in token mechanisms I will not focus on that

today but again there's something here where you have kind of the the non- token version then there different token things you can do on top of that the first two product Le and sales Le product Le the user action here is you're going to a site and you're signing up so this is really a self-served model and in the web 2 example you might think of something like Squarespace or Zoom where you're signing up for an account and your self onboarding in web 3 an example here could be nanson and analy company and the team structure you need to support that is essentially your marketing team because you're marketing to Consumers that they're then signing up and using the product going to sales Le so on a sales Le go to market motion someone is coming to your site and they're requesting a demo and you have a

salesperson who's actually handholding you walking you through the options and benefits what's interesting is at a sales company so take the example of alchemy with web 3 infra they still have the product Le version but they also have this kind of sales Le so if it's an individual developer they might might just be going and self- serving and leaving if it's an Enterprise they'll kind of have this more sales motion and so your team structure here is sales and account management and say for you at your stage early stage startups it really is sales Le because you as the founders are handholding your first customers through that process as you start to get more developed as you start to get more standardized you likely will then go to a product Le version and then as you grow you would add back sales Le the next type is Integrations and

distribution Channel Partnerships so in this case the user is actually not doing anything new they're they're using their same product but now it's available in more places an example here for an L1 so think the example of Aptos they have now more wallets custody exchange support So if you're a user you can use your same wallet but maybe now it has support for a new chain or in the case of xmt they partnered with coinbase to add messaging to coinbase's wallet so as a user here you're going to coinbase's wallet but now there's this great messaging feature in terms of Team structure a lot of this is business development related it's partnership related so you have this speeding Partnerships team but you also see things like Dow governance and so one of our portfolio companies layer zero they are a bridge and they're often times going through Dow governance to

get their Integrations voted in that's a very different goto Market motion than the traditional BD and and Partnerships the next one is developer Le so in this case you want someone to interact with your sdks or build on top of your offering and so for a gaming info company like badic block that's really the primary relationship there in the motion is developer relations or for an L1 or L2 like salana or optimism again it's kind of building lots of apps on top of that I say there's a version of this which is where the developer is your own team and often times you see this when you have a protocol that you're trying to bring to Market uh forecaster is a great example so here the user action is actually the same because it turns into consumer app so it's still sign up farcaster launched

warp cast as we all know as the first client within the CSX cohort we have Nosh that's bringing protocol to Market through the Nosh app same thing with strobe and in this case you have traditional kind of app or of team so that's product engineering design the last one is community based and so in this case the action might be to engage on Discord or show up to an in-person event some examples here Yuga labs they have a different number of different nft communities and they created eight fests they want you to show up to this event with farcaster they had Faron and we had our own farway con here and those weren't even organized by farcaster or if you're a game like proof of play they might have their Discord Bots or other things on Discord and in this case you need a community manager and event

organizer you can mix and match these go to market motions and I'd say most of you probably have some combination of these it's not just one or the other and in web 3 especially I'd say in web two you tend to see a SAS business and their kind of product or sales or they're more limited you potentially might be using all of these at some point in your journey moving into tactics it's a long list of different tactics not again not exhaustive but some are potentially more web 2 like some are more web 3 native and the I haven't seen these really interacting too much but I do think it's starting to go there where you have analytics platforms that are allowing you to take the best of these Trad lovers maybe take an email address and do something with it or take a wallet

address and run some analytics on top of it an example here Unis swap they do traditional display advertising and they also obviously have done air drops and other things like that so how do we typically work with portfolio companies a few different ways the the first one is through product launches so this could be everything from your launch strategy thinking through competitive positioning we recently had a portfolio company they had a product that was very successful in one region and they wanted to bring it to a different region so we helped them think through the timing the competive positioning the analysis around doing that the second is partnership advice we do a lot of this and this could be tactical introductions it could be walking you through a contract negotiation kind of going through play-by-play what that might

look like so an example of a great introduction is we connected one of our portfolio companies with a large automotive manufacturer and they ended up collaborating something pretty cool on the contract negotiation front we were helping one of our companies negotiate against an Oracle and we were able to shave off several million dollars off their integration fee just through kind of talking through the basics of contract negotiation Pierce gave a great talk on this during last CSX and he's available to talk about any sort of negotiating tactics we also spend a significant amount of our time on what I would call blockers and escalations and this could be things like getting blocked at one of the app stores it could be any sort of infrastructure support and this probably happens on an a weekly if not daily basis where we have a company that is

having some some kind of issue or problem here and so an example and this happened just last week was one of our wallets they were blocked on the App Store they couldn't get on and we were able to help them escalate it think through kind of what the reasons might be provide documentation back to Apple and they were able to launch just the other day and then on the infra side so we had another company that had a great problem they were growing very very quickly as a result they hit all the rate limits on all of their services and so uh at AWS they tapped out and the site went down and we were able to get help them get the site up within a matter of hours versus the typical 48 or 72 hours that you'd find from uh you know just opening up a support ticket Um

this can also be something like custody support So as you're launching a token we can help with introductions to qualified custodians or something as simple as just like getting your coinbase institutional account up and expedited so in terms of the go to market checklist I'd say regardless of any of the go to market motions that you might have here are a few things these are I made it 10 so it's an easy number there are 10 things that you need before you embark on that motion the first side is collateral and this is really organized by shortest to longest so you you absolutely need your boiler plate this is your kind of written paragraph version as well as your verbal elevator pitch and this is useful in sending any sort of introduction email when you're talking to anyone like this is table Stakes having your boilerplate and your

logo and kind of all those assets the next is your one pager and so what does a one pager have it typically has a little bit more about the compy company a few potential use cases and this is something you might send in advance of a meeting just to kind of help the person kind of prep for the meeting or you might send it as a second email when someone says hey that sounds really interesting can you share more the third is your sales or BISD deck this is slightly different from your investment or pitch deck this is this deck should actually be two or three different decks and it should really be tailored to the different ICP types or ideal customer profile types Pierce we talk a lot about this later but this should have slight variations on messaging and I would recommend not sending this in advance

this is not something that you necessarily pre-read this is something you're walking through on a first call and then finally your website do not forget this I can't tell you the number of times I'm connecting a company with a potential partner and they go to the website and they're like there's nothing there and like that they just like almost is a non-starter and so make sure if it's relevant you have your developer documentation and please please add case studies really any case studies this is something that when someone's looking to partner with you they like it it's not just this proof point but something I say is really important to have for for any type of conversation moving to the analysis bucket so your customer segmentation many of you I've seen segment your customers this is great so you have these types of customers and

you're talking to all of them but what you might not be doing is saying who is the actual stakeholder at that type of customer who I need to be talking to and we've seen time and time again you spend six months talking to someone so it's the right company but it turns out it's the wrong person so you get them bought on it turns out they have no decision-making power and you just wasted six months of your time so understanding who is the right stakeholder at that sort of company the next one is your Channel or partner strategy and again this differs depending on if you're B2B which is business to business B to D business developer B to C Business to Consumer and that can really affect how you think about your channel strategy the third is competitive positioning so as Ariana said it's important to have in your

pitch but it is really really important to have when you're going to Market with a partnership conversation because what you're doing is you're actually if you're talking to a potential customer you have them they have kind of maybe one of your competitors they now need to rip that out and put you in so you need to have a really good reason why they should do that or they're looking at you and they're deciding between you and your competitors and you need to have a reason why you stand Head and Shoulders above the others and then the last one again this goes to kind of that categorization so having your partner categorization which again a lot of you do naturally but having the prioritization and so the number of times Pierce and I get a list of 50 different companies that someone wants to talk to and we say but like who are

the most important ones and there's kind of this blank St so thinking through what that really means like who's going to add Revenue who's going to be a great case study like what are those key partners and the last is process so you want to set up your pipeline and it doesn't really even matter what format it's in I've seen great pipelines that are in Google Docs they can be in notion it could be an a table it could even be in a Word document but what you really need to have is your categories and typically that would be initial conversation in conversation technical diligence integration like post integration as simple as that but then you also want to have your owners so how are you approaching and making sure that things are getting from category to category and maybe at different stages so the technical implementation you're

bringing in someone from your engineering team for example so who are you bringing in at each stage and then the last one is your inbound management process and your outbound your Outreach strategy and again you might have all the inbound in the world it's so exciting everyone's reaching out to you but it's from the wrong partners and so really mapping that against your prioritization and saying we might get all this inbound but actually what is our out reach strategy back so we'll actually be spending most of today focused on these two things we think they're so critical so one is the elevator pitch and the other is key messaging and I will pass it to pierce to talk about those so I'm really happy that during Chris's talk he was able to touch on I think he came during Q&A um but he was able to touch on this concept

that we go like as a venture capital firm we think about finding stars and you can use like whatever analogy you want like some people say athletes Stars you know Best in Class whatever um your ability to communicate and exceed expectations is everything and that all starts with storytelling so what we're trying to help do today is not only implore you but help you figure out how to master the Art of Storytelling and make it a superpower some of these artifacts are going to seem um potentially too mature or further dated for you than as an early stage startup company but they are critically important artifacts because they anchor you not only in a reality that you can live within but they also

help establish your credibility and intent as a Founder um so this is anyone know who this is Andy Parks and R okay great okay a couple people well the blank stair should be enough to communicate the message here like nobody in your network whether it's a co-founder whether it's an investor whether it's an employee whether it's a potential customer should ever feel this way about your company and its purpose and its Mission so we're going to spend a little bit time talking about mission statements actual definition of a mission statement doesn't really matter in this context like what I want to impart on everybody here is that having a mission statement delivers you a number of different benefits and so we'll go through what some of those benefits are it delivers you as a

Founder Direction in the web 3 space there is so much Innovation and there's so much rapid growth that it can be incredibly easy to get sidetracked or to go down an alternative path that leads you away from your core Mission and so a statement really can help you think about the things that support your long-term goals that you set out to uh achieve when you founded the company a mission statement can also help differentiate your company um even in web 3 which is still a nent category and growing very rapidly there are a number of different providers for similar products and customers or partners are faced with seemingly similar choices differentiating yourself can help you win not only attract but win customers

and partners based on what is unique about you as Founders and the team and company that you're building it's also important to memorialize this a mission statement for company culture right ideally you're going to be growing rapidly and adding uh a number of people to your team and having a mission statement really gives you the ability to unify the efforts of all your uh colleagues employees um regardless of their role or tenure or core job responsibility um a really like cheesy quote is like get the boat rowing in the same direction like a mission statement can help you do that um and then lastly I would encourage you to come up with a mission statement and you may already have one and may need to rework it to give yourselves the space to be

adaptable like inevitably there will be moments in time where you have to flex your core purposes whe whether that might be an evolving product landscape a new initiative that you're bringing um on board so I would leave room for adaptability so mission statement is really like the first artifact to think about and then as you think about your products and services the second thing to think about is a benefit statement so I there's a number of situations that we've all probably been in where we felt like in this case Pablo Escobar sitting on a bench in Bard in boredom in anticipation but what a benefit statement will do is deliver again these four core principles that you can immediately act on as a Founder so again the definition here really doesn't

matter of like what a benefit statement is we're all going to unpack that together but what they can do for your products and services is deliver intense Clarity and compound Clarity uh it's going to enhance your your customers understanding of of who you are and what you're building uh it's going to allow them to identify things that they resonate with when you're engaging with them and then that feedback loop reinforces everything that is laid out in your mission statement benefit statements also create this emotional connection so when you're speaking to a prospective counterparty you're speaking to an investor coming up here at demo day um appealing to those emotions is really appealing to their needs what are they missing like what are you there fixing and establishing that

relationship builds trust almost immediately with again whoever it might be a potential partner a customer an investor Etc um a benefit statement can also increase the efficiencies of your conversations uh I think we're all here to maximize our time or return on our time and so cutting to the to the Chase and having a concise and Consolidated customer focus statement can just help you create that efficiencies for yourselves um and then ideally a benefit statement is outcome oriented right you got to lead the proverbial horse to the proverbial water so that they drink these are not technical specifications even in web 3 that is overtly technical these should be tangible outputs that whoever you're speaking to is going to receive from working together so we're

going to go through a couple examples just to really cement this idea I realize again that these might be artifacts that are either well established within your companies and maybe we can all re look at them together today or they might be things that you feel like are too far out and too far dated but I couldn't encourage you to think about them enough so this is linkedin's mission statement it reads connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful what I really like about this mission statement is they Define their industry position right it's a social media platform but for businesses and professionals very clear it also lends to this concept of culture and adaptability right make them more productive and successful like that's a very morphous uh statement and it creates the flexibility for LinkedIn to

uh pivot to uh add products and services but tether them back to the overall objective of the company they also have a number of benefit statements because they have a number of different products but they mo they make most of their revenue from subscriptions and advertising and in fact U their advertising product is called LinkedIn marketing Service uh Solutions and last year alone I think it pulled in $4 billion of revenue for them so this is the benefit statement for LMS or LinkedIn marketing Solutions and I've highlighted the really key part here which is the customer focus statement so not only does this bring Clarity immediately to anyone who might be reading it or hearing it in person sophisticated B to be targeting like that speaks directly to the customer or partner that they're they're going after

and then it also builds this uh emotional connection in the first half of the benefit statement which is building long-term relationships long-term relationships in a B2B um in a B2B go to market motion is everything so those relationships are hyper valuable and Link LinkedIn is speaking directly to these with this benefit statement here's one a little closer to home so coinbase's mission statement is to increase economic freedom in the world you might notice like it outlines the company goal for sure it doesn't really differentiate it in terms of its position in market and I kind of like it like maybe that's because they don't need to as a canonical centralized exchange that's to say that you don't have to have all of these elements as long as you have the guiding principles

of what a mission statement is uh there to accomplish then um you're treading in the right direction and then this is the benefit statement for base the L2 which I know everyone is familiar with uh it's a secure lowcost Builder friendly ethereum 2 built to bring the next billion users on chain the next billion users on chain I think is a little controversial it's like an overplayed um you know statement in crypto but here with the benefit statement again they're giving extreme Clarity what are what are developers looking for what are customers uh consumers users looking for secure low cost friendly very clear um and concise and then it does build that emotional connection to all of us who have been in crypto long enough to know that uh the next billion users on chain

is a is a phrase used by many companies in this space um but it also you know kind of um like pulls at that emotional connection to that we all feel which is you know the proliferation of this technology uh and bringing new consumers into the space and then the last one I'll touch on uh because I think you get the point by now is opy um their mission state is to build the world's most trusted and inclusive nft marketplace with the best selection so again very clearly outlines the company goals and then it defines its industry position I actually really like this because if you're in nftd Marketplace there are so many things that you could look to also build and integrate into your core offering that it can be distracting right so they they ground themselves in

their mission statement of we are an nft Marketplace yeah wallets like you know uh everything else that comes along with uh interoperability and uxui like that's somebody else's core problem this is the benefit statement for openc wallet funny enough that I just mentioned wallets and the the key thing here that that I highlighted is their customer focus statement right all without a separate wallet extension I think we're all familiar with the Pains of uh web3 wallet interfaces um and so this speaks directly to again that emotional connection with you as a user or a developer um and it also helps deliver Clarity so if you couldn't tell like I'm a big fan of the memes does anyone know who this is like okay all right great well I asked if you knew who Andy was

and like everyone was like I don't know um so if you haven't seen this clip it is awesome um Michael like is very nervous he gets called down to corporate uh or up I don't know where Pennsylvania is in relationship to New York but he gets called into corporate and he's like super nervous and he shows up and his boss David um asks him to explain like how the branch is performing so well and so Michael kind of like opens up on this ramble and he says well you know David you know My Philosophy is basically this and then it's just like 30 seconds of him doing this whole recursive stumbling around um explanation of what his philosophy is it doesn't make any sense your elevator pitch is your story it's your story as a Founder it's your

company story and it's something that you need to own and should be able to say in your sleep so it's the synthesis of the things that we just touched on right the mission statement is an artifact the benefit statement is an artifact they coales into this um elevator pitch that you're going to know and own in your sleep this might be obvious but we want to just talk about it for a second there's a lot of benefits to putting this work in now like you all had an elevator pitch to get into this program but you've gone through six weeks of curriculum you've met each other the space has changed in six weeks you should be constantly evaluating your ability to go out and market and clearly articulate what the point of your company is and so not only

does that establish your brand as a founder like literally who you are in your representation of intent with building your company but it establishes your company brand um it also operationalizes your time if you can hone your elevator pitch and get it down so that you know within 30 seconds after delivering it whether or not you're talking to the right person is everything um and that talking to the right person is kind of the the last Point here it helps you close the feedback loop so whether you understand your purpose or not becomes very evident if your elevator pitch is landing or not and then also if you've identified the right stakeholder or not becomes very evident based on the reception so we are going to spend some time uh working on this together again I mentioned this you

all at some point have developed an elevator pitch for the company You're Building here within the cohort but now you've gone through this six weeks of curriculum four more five more to go um and last week you spent some time with Steve Ebert thinking about brand building and so now it's time to put all those things to work and really get down to business and make sure that none of you wind up like Michael Scott so so we're going to break out into your individual groups like your individual teams um and work on a two-minute elevator pitch um and then we're going to come back we'll we're going to talk about ident um icps ideal customer profiles and we'll kind of go into the next part of the workshop after that so you have about 10 or 15 minutes to work on an elevator pitch and then things

will get juicy from there so again like mission statements benefit statements the the artifacts of your company values and culture are things that evolve over time and so you know it's it's always a good practice to go back refresh reset make sure you're still aligned with your co-founder your employees Etc the same with your elevator pitch like I'm still working on my elevator pitch every time I'm at a new conference every time I'm in Market depending on what my priorities are and what I'm trying to achieve um so hopefully this exercise is just again bringing your attention to something that is a hypercritical tool in your tool chest as we head into demo day so in the context of an elevator pitch

today we're speaking about Partners customers users but this same elevator pitch can be applicable to anyone that is relevant to your business outcomes and objectives and so we're just going to talk about ideal customer profile for a second official definition of ICP from Gardner is firmographic environmental and behavioral attributes of accounts that are expected to become a company's most valuable customers you can think of like firmographic is similar to how demographics describe an individual firmographics are at the firm level or at like your ability to segment customers um and in web 3 like this is kind of a hard definition to work with right because like it immediately jumps to business outcomes objectives accounts Etc and especially for preed companies

in web 3 so rather than thinking about it uh about it as accounts and customers I actually think about all of these terms as being interoperable an ICP as an early stage founder can be anyone that is relevant to the business objectives that you're trying to achieve and so what really it really becomes about is actually understanding and and trying to hone in on the psycho uh Graphics which is like the attitudes the interests um the personality traits of the counterparty that you're speaking to and then another important concept to borrow from benefit statements is really identifying like their needs and pains so you can imagine um for example with either a user in your community or a customer like their needs and pains

might be the same they might be different [Music]