Oddience

I launched oddience.co this week and did one simple thing.

Some days before, I reached out to friends and work peers telling them about my upcoming announcement, asked for their feedback and sought their support to help me spread the word when they see the announcement.

That's the hack. You can stop reading here and just go apply that.

Here's the break down for why you should do it too.

It's the fastest way to learn what'll resonate when you finally announce.

I learned on the fly as I spoke to more people. I identified what came across as exciting, I also learned what words were flying over people's heads. What came out of that was a crash course in storytelling.

Switch onlookers to amplifiers.

Literally everyone I reached out to, liked, replied, quoted, retweeted, reposted, shared in their private communities. While I would have gotten some engagement, bringing people on the journey through a sneak peak sparked a whole lot more excitement which helped me surpass my desired numbers for reach and traffic. It's easy to assume people will know how to support you but it's more powerful when you tell them how you'd like to be supported.

Build credibility from day 1

Social proof is powerful and I noticed getting positive responses from all around improved the perception of our product - even with previous ICPs we had contacted who were reluctant to get on private beta.

It puts some fire in your belly

Launching a startup in a far-from-perfect state gives you all the cringe and makes you just want to stay tweaking and tweaking. As I talked to more people, and saw their reactions, encouragement, excitement - it gave me a lot of courage to do it.

Keeps you accountable

I had written a previous post some weeks before, asking for an ideal day to launch. Looking back, the question came from a place of fear. I wanted to get things to a place I felt comfortable enough with sharing and so one bug fix or a provider downtime sent me spiraling into extra days of tweaks. But the minute I started telling people about my upcoming announcement, I had to commit to a date so they knew when to expect and provide support. We were fixing bugs right in the middle of the announcement but if I hadn't shared with anyone prior, I'd have had perfect, highly reasonable explanations for why we needed to wait another day or 12.

So, try the hack. It could save you from yourself.

I listen to at least 5 podcast episodes weekly and I've compiled some episodes that stood out to me in the last month as a founder.

Software is Eating The World, Now, AI is Eating Startups

AI is something that seemed on the fringe of innovation until ChatGPT. It's phenomenal to see everyday people talk about applying AI in their personal/work lives but along this are also lots of pre-ChatGPT AI startups struggling to catch up.

Before, you could get away with slapping AI to your startup name, now that it is pretty much now table stakes, what next?

I don't have answers but if you are seeking inspiration as a B2B founder, perhaps this episode can give you some ideas.

Title: Applying AI in B2B (A16z)
URL: https://pca.st/episode/8a1b97ae-2a8d-4a78-80c5-738d53070067

Network Effects Are Not Just For Marketplaces

This was pretty insightful because I didn't know there were that many network effects to start with, but listening to this series really helped me identify ways to build in network effects into my product - oddience.co

There are 11 episodes so far on The NFX Podcast but these 3 are pretty important one

URL:
Episode 1: (Why Network Effects are Mission Critical.)
https://pca.st/episode/8e0960a5-5359-4291-a2d6-e19d67b7fa95

Episode 3: (Mapping out the 16 Network Effects.)
https://pca.st/episode/631bf90c-ccb7-4595-b1f0-3ebd34c077a1

Episode 8: (Your Life is Driven by Network Effects.)
https://pca.st/episode/fdec1c1a-dc41-401c-b435-0d17eb22fa1c

Attention is Everything

I listened to this episode just before I rolled out oddience.co to public beta, and applying some of the insights here landed me 2 press features currently in the works.

Even for someone who's built a career in Marketing, it was great to learn some tactics afresh through the lens of a founder.

Title: Building Your Startup's Attention Flywheel
URL: https://pca.st/episode/c576e62c-f71e-4955-99ff-0b481d990403

Building Your Startup Like a Game

Stop everything you are doing and listen to this podcast episode.
I can't recommend it enough and will probably listen a few more times.
It has a great brain reset element to it around building your product. Worth every minute.

Name: The Business of Gaming
URL: https://pca.st/episode/d062711c-9ee6-4625-a2ba-9d682272ec62

I'll share more episodes in the coming weeks but these are pretty good ones I highly recommend for founders, first time or repeat.