Author Archives: Elan

Startup Geographic Expansion Strategy

If you are scaling into new geographies, I wrote this for you.

When managing a startup across multiple geographies, you may wonder how to best:

  • Align on vision
  • Allocate resources
  • Communicate progress

At SpotHero, a consumer marketplace for parking, we had this problem. We first launched in Chicago. We knew we had to expand to new cities, but the odds were against us.

Several competitors were already national. They had been around longer. They had launched in new cities first. They had raised more money. Not to mention several other existential threats we faced. Many folks thought we were doomed before we ever got started.

But, we prevailed.

To solve out geographic scaling objectives, we built a plan. We called our plan the “National Domination Plan.”

The National Domination Plan was one slide. Its power was in its simplicity.

The National Domination Plan had a few key elements:

  1. Tier of Market
  2. Goal by Tier
  3. Geographies by Tier
  4. Defining KPIs
  5. Resource commitments by team (e.g. Sales Staffing, Marketing Budget)
  6. Specific strategies or tactics for each tier of market

The National Domination Plan can look something like this:

Having a National Domination Plan is important for a few reason:

  • Allows you to both operate new markets and others at scale.
  • Reminder that your goals may differ by stage (e.g. “soft launch” vs “scale”)
  • Enables you to set expectations for KPIs to balance new vs existing markets
  • Specifies on resource commitments by team to minimize bottlenecks
  • Clarifies to everyone what you will and won’t do.
  • Communicates why some markets are performing better than others

Here’s what it might look like as you start to fill it out:

Using the National Domination Plan, a voice over might sounds something like this:

“We tier our markets from 1 to 4, each with a unique goal. For Tier 2 markets, our goal is to optimize from a launch market where we test to a market with profitable unit economics. Texas is the main geo in Tier 2. We’re improving LTV/CAC from <1 to the 1 to 2 range. In order to get there, we need sales to hire an account manager to optimize our existing merchant relationships. We will also double advertising. We’ll do this by launching our search engine marketing ads on Google. Once we hit an LTV/CAC of 2, we’ll move Texas to a Tier 3 market to focus on scaling volume with more sales and marketing resources.”

A few years after implementing our National Domination Plan framework, we:

  • Scaled to 300+ cities
  • Emerged as the market leader
  • Acquired multiple competing companies
  • Gained the biggest marketshare across every city
  • Earned recognition as one of the biggest consumer marketplaces in North America

The plan worked. This framework can be applied to almost any business trying to scale by region. If you are running that type of business, you are welcome to repurpose my National Domination Plan for your own startup. Would just love to hear from you if you do!

Aligning Startup Teams As You Scale

As startups grow, natural divides can grow between different departments or teams.

Ignoring these problems can hamper growth. So, how do you proactively solve?

No need to reorganize the team, change P&L responsibility or update incentives.

Create a North Star metric.

A North Star metric is a goal that many departments or teams are working toward. Those teams need to understand how they each contribute to that goal.

Here’s an example for how to align product and marketing:

An example of a North Star Metric is Cohort ROI (maximizing profit for a subset of customers) and the sub variables that each department or team can control.

A marketing team wants to grow web traffic using SEO. This requires more text on a page. A product team wants to improve conversion rates. This requires simplifying the page including less text. The SEO Manager and Product Manager feel those goals are at odds based on page layout. What do you do?

First, set a North Star metric of “Cohort ROI” for the company. This means maximize profits for a given subset of customers.

Next, compare the impact on Cohort ROI of increasing users via more SEO web/mobile traffic and improving customer acquisition costs by improving conversion rates. One model for doing this is a RICE model. If you need more data as a model input, run a test.

Finally, all else equal, move forward with the lever that has a bigger impact.

To solve alignment across scaling teams, use these three steps:

  1. Align on a North Star metric, clarifying how each team’s lever impacts the metric
  2. Rank trade offs, based on which lever, strategy or tactic best helps get there
  3. Decide and execute

That’s it.


Business Development Deal Sourcing

There are three ways to grow your startup. Build. Buy. Partner. At first, you usually build. At scale, it may make sense to buy. Somewhere in between, you may begin to partner to scale your startup.

When it is time to get started, what do you do? Here’s how I think about getting started:

bd deal sourcing framework scale your startup elan mosbacher

Select Segment

What is your goal? For example, if you are focused on customer acquisition find bigger companies with more customers who match the profile of your customer.

Define Solution

What do you offer them? Well, perhaps your product can make theirs more sticky and help them better retain a subset of your customers.

Set Filters

Of the companies in your target segment, which ones are most attractive and why? Will they also found your value prop interesting?

Prioritize Partners

Based on your solution and filters, stack rank a list of target companies. From there, determine the right decision marker (often executive, business development leader, or for tech product manager).

Pitch Partners

Outreach directly or via introduction from mutual contact to begin a conversation about partnering.

The Startup General Manager

To scale your startup, your job is to set a vision, raise capital and recruit a team.

One milestone in recruiting a team is hiring your first startup General Manager (“GM”). This role can be tricky in part because a GM doesn’t own one specific function. Articulating why you need a GM, when to hire one and how to set the role up for success can be challenging.

This post will focus on:

  • What is a startup general manager
  • When to hire your first general manager
  • Who to hire as your startup’s general manager
  • How to setup a general manager for success
  • Why communication cadence for general managers is key

What Is A Startup General Manager

A General Manager (GM) is a leader, manager, and/or jack-of-all-trades (aka athlete) with technical, functional or industry expertise to run a part of your startup.

The GM’s job is to:

a) Set a vision/strategy/focus for the business area

b) Get the right people, org structure and cross-functional support in place

c) Set goals (KPIs) and resource allocation (eg. sales, R&D, marketing investments) and team alignment to hit targets

d) Move the ball forward, make decisions and get results in a given area of the business

A GM must manage up, manage a team, and manage cross-functional stakeholders to drive the business forward. A GM is unique in that they don’t one any one function. They either run a company within a company, or they depend on managing by influence for functional resources.

When To Hire Your First GM

When to hire your first GM is often a challenge. You’ll rarely have unanimous consent as those working on the project as a side project may resist sharing their legos.

As your technology startup scales, you’ll hire in phases. First, you hire functional individual contributors. Then you hire managers, directors, and so on as you scale in size and complexity.

As your company grows, departments usually grow by function: Marketing owns lead generation. Sales owns revenue in a geography. Technology owns building products. Some larger initiatives may need more than a functional leader can provide.

For example, you may want:

a) cross-functional alignment for a specific vision

b) full-time attention to growing one area of the business or geography

c) single owner for accountability who knows all the details

The CEO or VP of Marketing or Product Manager may scale a business or line part time. Once a project becomes big enough that you’re betting your company on it, the project should have one owner. Someone who wakes up, spends all day, and goes to sleep thinking about that one priority.

When exactly may differ by company. For some, that may be a new product. For others, it may be a new geography or business line. At some point, it will be important enough that you don’t want to mess up and you need someone’s full time attention. When a priority becomes big enough that if successful the role will pay for itself and if not you’ll never grow.

Another way to look at it is this: if you launch anything new, that could one day be bigger than your entire company is now, it warrants a GM (read: mini-CEO). Let the GM run that business just as your existing business is run by a CEO.

When that time comes, it is time to hire a startup General Manager.

Who To Hire For Your Startup’s General Manager

The first step to hiring a startup general manager is recognizing you need one.

What is the key objective or business line that needs one accountable person? You may need to convince others this can no longer be a side project. It is worth betting on a dedicated hire to align stakeholders and accelerate growth.

The General Manager title may be right. Alternative general manager job titles could be, VP of X , Head of Y, or Director of Z. Sometimes regional sales directors, city managers, or market managers give a GM title. That title may be a stretch to attract and retain talent.

After posting a job description, you’ll likely get a range of applications. Having the right filters is important. Backgrounds of external applicants may include former CEOs of smaller companies, executives with experience across multiple functions, previous general managers, consultants, bankers, product managers or marketing leaders. Internal candidates may include rising stars within your company or industry that know at least one function well.

The key is finding a candidate who can frame problems, propose solutions and lead a team to get the job done. Relevant technical, functional or industry experience are nice to have too. Most important is the ability to lead and own a business of a similar size and complexity. You want someone who has enough breadth to not be a hammer that views every problem as a nail. Some depth where your team may otherwise be weak is a nice to have.

Strong general managers do several things well, including:

  • Setting a vision
  • Recruiting and retaining talent
  • Creating processes for managing stakeholders
  • Simplifying complexity
  • Monitoring few key KPIs that drive business decisions

If as a result of hiring a GM your life gets easier, the business grows faster and everyone on team levels up, you’ve probably made a good hire. If your life gets harder, the business doesn’t achieve its target or if other issues around team dynamics arise, then maybe not.

How To Setup Your General Manager Up For Success

New GMs must first learn the business, earn the team’s trust and build a vision that balances long term goals with securing some quick wins.

When managing up to a boss, executive team or board, GMs must:

  • Understand expectations
  • Get buy-in on proposed direction
  • Request help with any blockers
  • Keep manager informed
  • Get sign-off for anything new/different/in-need of tie-breaker across stakeholders

When managing your team team, GMs must:

  • Earn trust of the team
  • Get the right people in the right roles
  • Set direction and KPIs to track the business
  • Set role expectations, including job requirements, compensation & development
  • Check in to help the team and hold them accountable

One trick here is how to be helpful to the existing team, who may feel you are stepping on their toes a bit. One helpful way to think about how to bring the team together is Tuckman’s stages of group development. You’ll set norms, but someone will be upset about something. In the end, if you manage through it, you’ll resolve your differences and operate as a high performing team.

When managing cross-functional stakeholder, GMs must:

  • Listen and understand stakeholder goals
  • Articulate your own team’s goals
  • Find a “higher purpose” goal you can align on
  • Align on functional resource allocation or budget
  • Set agenda, medium and cadence for in-person and written updates
  • Make reasonable SMART asks of your cross-functional stakeholders
  • Highlight lack of bandwidth of support, considering folding that expertise into your team
  • Provide regular updates, in person make/debate asks, follow-up

Why Communication Cadence For General Managers Is Key

Once they’ve learned the people and business and have a direction in mind, GMs must to set a communication cadence to keep stakeholders informed. This cadence should align with the rest of the company. One example may be annual, quarterly, monthly and weekly reviews;

  • Annual updates should focus on vision, strategy, budgets, OKRs and development plans
  • Quarterly should be a review of P&L and OKRs
  • Monthly should review performance to plan last month and set focus for upcoming month to maintain alignment
  • Weekly should be status of projects last week, focus for next week, and removing any blockers for your team
  • Daily: Some teams find it helpful to do a brief 15-minute stand-up or written update on yesterday, today, and blockers
  • Pro Tip: If you review KPIs monthly, you get 12 slaps in the face. If you review them weekly, you get 52 and have more time to adjust. Find the right cadence for your business.

As you onboard a GM, it is important to be sure to that the GM will:

  • Request help and include your manager to align on cross-functional conversations
  • Be an advocate for your respective business / business line
  • Interface with key subset of clients/partners/vendors
  • Be fluent in your target customer, internal data and business financials
  • Establish and document best practices and SoP documents
  • Empower those around you to be a multiplier and accelerate everyone else’s goals

To learn more about hiring a GM, here’s a few other great resources:

Content Marketing Matrix

To grow customer acquisition, you can chose one of a few lanes — performance marketing, virality, or content marketing. In theory, content marketing is easy.

You pick an audience. You create content that is relevant. The content must entertains, educates or inform. You then distribute the content on the right medium at the right cadence with the right call-to-action. That’s about it.

The challenge, of course, is that A+ content marketing is an order of magnitude more impactful that B+ content marketing. If you are going to do pick this path, you have to get it right. Really right.

So, the question is where do you get started?

  1. Define your audience
  2. Define their customer journey ( From I didn’t know I had a problem all the way through to loving your product and referring their friends)
  3. Build a content marketing matrix

This post is about how to build a content marketing matrix. The content market matrix is the framework for your team to create impactful content for your audience.

To get started, you map out the stages of the customer journey across the columns. Across the rows, you list each persona you target and/or the different products and services you offer. Across the bottom, you list the call-to-action. Then, in the cells, you define the content you want to create for each stage of the journey for a given target buyer or product offering.

Content Marketing Matrix

Your content marketing matrix should look something like this:

To use the Content Marketing Matrix, simply:

Define each persona, product or service (rows)

Set each stage of the funnel or buyer journey (columns)

State where to find your audience across each stage of the journey (medium).

Decide what the next step you want them to take is (call-to-action).

From there, simply create the best piece of content on the internet. Maybe it is the first guide, the most comprehensive or more entertaining. Make it about them, not you. Publish it in the right spot, promote it to the right people. Don’t ask people to buy, just ask people to take the next step. Rinse and repeat.