Strateguy without Action is theatre…

… whereas Action without Strategy is gambling.

Even experienced founders can struggle with this tension: in the early stages, should you just get out there and start selling, or should you spend most of your time planning? You can’t ‘think yourself’ paying customers, but at the same time, just flailing around trying to flog a product to anyone who will listen to you, isn’t a smart use of resources.

Where do you draw the line? Let’s dig a bit deeper:

The case for ‘Strategy’

SaaS can take a long time to build up a head of steam. Getting it wrong can mean that your eventual growth is delayed. If you end up selling to the wrong market, solving the wrong problem with the wrong GTM model, you’ll die.

Clarity around who it’s for, the pain it solves and its differentiated value could save you months of wasted effort. No matter how much hustle you have, you can’t sell your way out of a bad positioning decision, no matter how talented you are.

The case for ‘Action’

You can have the most detailed and clever revenue model plumbed into a spreadsheet, but without executing against it, it becomes a delusion. As someone once pointed out to me when I was extolling the virtues of my revenue model: “will having numbers on a spreadsheet sell more licences?”

You can sit around strategising for months, but if you’re not actually talking to customers, seeing where prices are landing, shipping features and seeing what breaks, then we all know what happens.

Like startups who spend months on their logo and their website, or planning for every edge-case vulnerability, but don’t ever sit in front of a potential customer.

“What if customers decide to open loads of email accounts so they can sign up for a free trial multiple times?” - well, right now you have zero customers, so maybe worry about that if it ever becomes a problem.

The Trap for Agency Owners

In the early days of a product, agency owners tend to want to strategise. I know I did. Typically you’ll see agency owners building market maps, vision decks, revenue models and feature scoping. Basically, writing internal proposals. This is because agency owners feel very comfortable in this world. It’s how they’ve built their own businesses.

I’m not saying that any of this is wrong. In fact, building out revenue models is absolutely a good thing to do so you can validate your unit metrics and whether your proposed Go To Market stacks up.

But, as an agency owner you have to be aware that your world has been about presenting to clients and less about product market discovery. It’s a really important blind spot to know that you have. If you build websites, or branding, or PR campaigns for clients, as a founder, you will be most focused on how to win pitches based on how big your brain is (and those of the people working for you). What you’ll be less used to is figuring out how you could build a single product that solves the problems of many people.

The only way you are really going to understand this is by speaking to lots of customers about the challenges they have in their day-to-day, working closely with the early ones on their onboarding experience, and delivering fast iterative improvements to the product based on what you are learning.

None of that can be solved by ‘thinking about it’ in a private room in your members club, over a few bottles of Malbec and a juicy flat iron steak. As nice as that would be.

Rule of Thumb

Look, I can’t tell you exactly what you should do, but if you recognise that you are more comfortable strategising than doing, then push yourself to spend around 80% of your effort on speaking to customers and 20% on strategy. How would that look for you? What would it change?

It means you have a bias towards action, BUT, everything is based on the assumption that you are going to learn something. Which in turn will inform your strategy.

So it might look more like:

Action → Insight → Strategy → Focused Action → Repeat

What I’ve often seen is, if you are running your agency, you won’t feel that you have the time to talk to lots of individual customers - especially if you are selling something that is a lower ACV. In this case, you need to find someone to be the MD of your product business who can. Then you help with the 20%. But you need to make sure that the MD is focused on the 80% for the time when you’re not with them.

This is really important. I can think of one company in particular, who brought in two commercial leaders, neither of which wanted to go and talk to customers. Instead, they wanted to set up a load of workshops around defining the ICP and the value proposition. The result was after several months, neither of them had made a sale.

You need to understand your ICP 100%. Not doing that work will waste a load of time and delay things, but you need someone to do the 80%. And if that’s not you in the early days as you juggle the agency at the same time, then you need to find someone who is.