How To Handle Product Disconnect

“Why don’t you give Karen a call?”I was chatting with Ryan Armbrust, an Associate at ff Ventures, about their portfolio companies.  ff Ventures is one of those rare VCs that has built a dedicated infrastructure within their fund to help their portfolio companies with the various functions (staffing, biz dev, et. al.) that they desperately need but are not yet able to support in-house.  Funds that devote full time resources to this are rare enough; in the early stage investment space that ff Ventures plays in, it is virtually unheard of.We were discussing VolunteerSpot, a company that takes the pain out of organizing volunteer-led events.  87% of their nearly 3M users are moms and, since my prior two startups (Bunk1 & Layercake) were both family-focused, Ryan thought I might be able to offer some potentially useful insights.  So I set up a half hour call with their CEO, Karen Bantuveris.Karen and I hit it off immediately.  A recovering consultant like myself, she built VolunteerSpot to solve a personal pain point.  As she explained, she would turn on her phone after a flight home from a client and her inbox flood with dozens of emails.  But work was not the worst culprit; the majority of the email overload had to with her personal life.  Every time she was invited to volunteer for something (e.g., with her daughter’s school, her church), she entered Reply All Hell.  You know the place.  It’s where otherwise intelligent people think it’s fine to spam all their friends with short emails (“I’m in,” “Sounds great!”, “Cool!!!”, etc.) that don’t answer the question (e.g., “When can you man the concessions table?”) or omit key info (e.g., their name (Really?!), their contact info).Two hours into this half-hour call, we finally agreed to finish the conversation the next day.  By the end of the week, we were talking about my devoting a sizable block of time to help them with strategic partnerships and business development.Now I am a product guy at heart.  As much as any non-developer can make this claim, I build every product I have ever been involved with from the ground up, from vague concept, to prioritized feature list, MVP, wireframes, detailed specs, UX, etc. all the way through QA and customer support.  But because everyone at a startup wears multiple hats, I’d also done quite a bit of biz dev, marketing, sales – whatever had to get done – so I dove right in.After a few weeks of networking, I began to notice a strange feeling of disconnect from the product I was pitching.  I quickly figured out why: every other time I’d done biz dev it had been for products I’d built.  I knew them intimately, inside and out.  If a potential partner had a slightly atypical use case, I knew which lesser-used product feature to steer him to.  If he wanted something custom-coded, I had a good sense of whether it was a big or small ask from the tech team.  But VolunteerSpot was built and up-and-running over a year before I got involved and so, for the first time, I didn’t have that deep product knowledge.  It felt oddly surreal.So I’ve had to adapt a little.  I am happy to share my strategies for beating product disconnect… and eager to get any suggestions you might have.1.       Learn the productThere’s no excuse for not putting in the hours.  You should know enough about the company to understand the typical use cases and to try to use product that way.  Then look through the help section of the website to get a feel for known limitations, suggested workarounds, and other, less typical use cases.It helps to have a few email accounts you can use for testing, especially if your product has multiple user types.  For instance, I needed to experience VolunteerSpot’s services both as an event organizer and as a participating volunteer.  If you use gmail, you can set up email aliases on the fly for this.  If your actual email is yourname@gmail.com, you can use yourname+organizer@gmail.com and yourname+volunteer@gmail.com.  No prior setup is required and both emails will go to your normal address but you will be able to tell which email was sent to which user by seeing which alias is in the email’s sent to field.2.       Set expectationsIn my case, since I don’t have an official role at VolunteerSpot, I often frame my participation as my “helping out a company that I am invested in.”  So if I don’t know every nook and nuance of the service, it is to some extent excusable.  When this is not an option, you might instead acknowledge that you joined the company relatively recently.  Done correctly, this can segue into all the great things about your current company that seduced you into leaving your old one.  Sometimes the same pitch sounds less salesy when phrased as “but what I really loved about this company….”And when all else fails, you can always mention a recent product redesign.  :-)3.       Don’t fake itIt’s much better to firmly say, “I think so / don’t think so but let me double-check and get back to you” than it is to fake it and not sound genuine.  Or worse, get caught getting it wrong.  If you've done your homework (see #1 above), odds are that this situation will only arise in response to an obscure or novel use case.  Your prospect is likely even aware that he is taking things off the beaten track and won’t judge you harshly if you don’t have the answer right away.4.       Learn from itWhen this happens, don’t just hook your prospect up with someone else in the company who can answer the question.  You talk to the expert and educate yourself.  Or invite the expert to a conference call to answer the prospect’s questions while you listen and learn.(Afterthought: Reading over the post above, I can’t help wondering how wide an audience it will find.  Seasoned biz dev professionals may find this advice blindingly obvious; they may be used to joining companies after the early building stage and accept some level of product disconnect as entirely normal.  On the flip side, startup veterans are more likely to be handing off their biz dev role to the pro when their companies reach that level than they are to be taking on a biz dev role at a different company.  So please let me know if you found this post useful or not.)