I'm Chris Ronzio, Founder and CEO of Trainual. AMA!

@rajaraman I love this thoughtful question, thank you.

There is a balance between working on processes too soon, and waiting too long to instill them. Early in a business, you are experimenting. There is no defined, proven process. So the first mistake would be dedicating too much time to creating documentation around unproven processes. We don’t document or formalize anything until we’re ready to delegate it to someone else.

The next mistake would be delegating without documenting, or setting the expectation for the result that you’d like. If someone fails at an experiment, they’re getting closer to a solution. This helps you grow. If someone fails at a proven process, they didn’t have good instructions. This prevents you from growing.

So, I think get-the-job-done scrappiness and process are mutually exclusive. Not something that is tied to the maturity of the business, but tied to the maturity of the initiative.

3 Likes

Hi @Krish! Good to reconnect with you.

We invested in affiliates and resellers in month #2 of the business. The reason for this was that as a former consultant myself, I knew the influence that I had over my small business customers to recommend the right solutions. So, in growing Trainual, I knew that relationships with other consultants and influencers would be a powerful way to build early trust around our brand.

We quickly grew to over 1,000 affiliates, and in the first year, they accounted for about 12% of our revenue. I think this created some word of mouth virality that we couldn’t have otherwise purchased at the time.

I had the advantage of working with my consulting clients and using Trainual internally before we ever launched Trainual as a public product. So, I’d recommend to other early-stage B2B founders that they look for early signs of validation from their first customers, and spend a lot of time with those customers to understand where they shop, where they learn, what podcasts they listen to, what books they read, what associations they participate in, and who influences them. Then, spend time getting aligned with those things to build trust with your ideal customers.

4 Likes

Hey Chris,
Thanks for taking the time to talk today!

Any tips for keeping a big picture view, and not getting sucked into the everyday short-term detail/fixes/jobs to do. Or maybe its just me that has that problem :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Hi @Anushree – thanks for this.

As a consumer, I spent more time on Facebook/IG than Twitter/LinkedIn, so it felt more organic to produce and promote content on those channels to attract an avatar like me (small business owner). We tested LinkedIn early on, and it seemed like the engagement wasn’t close to what we saw on Facebook and Instagram, so when we got one channel to work, we continued to scale and invest heavily in it. Every 3 days, we increased our ad budget by 20%. It led to some pretty scary credit card bills :slight_smile: LinkedIn is working better now than it was 3 years ago, but I suggest producing content where you can get the most engagement.

Initially, we used interest based targeting for people that liked certain facebook pages (the Shark Tank TV show, Tony Robbins, Entrepreneurs Organization, etc). That produced a large audience that we could drive to our website. Then, we refined the audience to be a smaller group that was like the customers that engaged with our first ads. Eventually, we relied on lookalike audiences of visitors that signed up for a trial, and then of customers that converted from a trial, and then smaller and smaller groups of our best customers.

4 Likes

Really interesting, thanks so much Chris!

3 Likes

Dear Chris, great reading your replies & knowing about Trainual’s journey, its absolutely inspiring. I wanted to talk about how do you make sure “Voice of the Users” is heard within the organisation in Engineering, Customer Success & Product teams.

  • What tools / process you use / recommend to constantly collect user feedback ?

  • How do we train or sensitise our teams on “user empathy” as we intuitively focus on customers & economic buyers and often forget the user.

  • Finally how do you document or flow the “ideas from users on which feature to build / fix” which needs to be carefully treated different than an issue / support ticket.

Interested to hear your views on this.

3 Likes

@angusbradley haha I think this is an “everyone” problem, not just you.

Keeping a big picture view - I have always set very defined quarterly goals. I write them on my whiteboard at home, my whiteboard in my office, and inside our project management system. So, I can’t help but see them all the time. I try to be intentional about blocking time on my calendar for getting certain types of work done. So, team meetings happen on Mondays, Interviews/Press happen on Wed/Thursdays, mastermind groups/networking on Fridays, deep work on Tuesdays/Wednesdays. It’s not a perfect science but it adds some structure to make sure that I have space.

Not getting sucked into details - weekly 1:1s with all of my direct reports. Empower them to solve problems. Give them support, coaching, autonomy, training. When I get asked about small issues, I push back and ask if it’s a decision they can make.

Constant work-in-progress, but hiring great people goes a long way toward solving this.

4 Likes

We used Canny.io for a while, recently switched to ProductBoard.com - both integrate with Intercom and Jira, so CS reps can create tickets and push updates to customers. We use Delighted.com for surveys and NPS.

We try to hire empathetic, caring people, so it’s not something we’ve had to have a curriculum or explicit training around, however we do talk a lot in our training about core values, share examples of great customer conversations, and publicly applaud this kind of thing in a “Praise” channel in Slack, and live at our weekly all-hands meetings. When you celebrate employees for helping customers, the behavior is a lot more prevalent.

Support tickets go through a dedicated PM, who has a triage process of verifying that something is a bug, not a feature request.

We have a dedicated engineering squad that focuses on bugs and back-end/internal ideas, but that has evolved over the last 6 months. It used to be that our teams would switch sprints between bugs and features, but now we can run in tandem.

Feature requests get logged in ProductBoard, and every month we have a “product ideation meeting”, where everyone at the company is invited in and given the floor to vocalize anything that they think needs to be a priority. Our designers and engineers get 10% of their weekly schedule to work on off-roadmap items too, so it’s a fun way to switch gears and check something fun off the ideas list, which our internal teams always appreciate.

4 Likes

Dear Chris, You started at 14 :slight_smile: :open_mouth: that’s wow !!, would also want to know the key management lessons you have learnt & the hard way to manage & run teams. Especially on building internally talent, hiring outside, culture, hierarchy, growth mindset etc.

Mostly which areas you feel you did a not so great job as a CEO / Founder. Will be great to hear for founders like me & few others you started early ( I started at 25, much later than yours :smile: ) so which areas and mistakes to avoid ?

3 Likes

For us, our largest channel was through paid marketing, which generated inbound leads. To date, we still don’t have an outbound team, it’s just something we’re experimenting with now.

I don’t discourage trying any channel if there’s conviction around why it could work! Let me know if there’s something more specific that I can dig into.

2 Likes

Another thing I should mention here - before each roadmap item, our PMs and Designers typically do 10-20 customer calls to really validate the pain points and understand what is being requested. We talk a lot about how requests fit into our long term strategy, and whether short term solutions conflict with long term goals. When we start to build something, the team also does a great job reaching back out to customers and watching them use mock designs or prototype builds. The customer is very important, but there are also some features that we design internally that customers aren’t asking for, because we have a belief that they will create new behaviors.

2 Likes

Dear Chris, I was just checking https://trainual.partnerstack.com/. Looks really very strong value prop. I see a very neat process to onboard affiliates.
While you / growth team were perfecting the pitch, steps, value prop to attract affiliates & set up this program what were some of the failures, missteps, lessons learnt & what worked for Trainual ? Also super interested to know how did you arrive at the 10% number for commissions & renewals too ? Did some A/B test went into that & how did it vary with higher ticket / lower ticket deals ?

2 Likes

Early on, I did a bad job of defining the role I was hiring for. It was hard enough to drag one of my friends in to help with something, that I would accept anyone with a heartbeat :sweat_smile: The biggest thing I had to get better at was recruiting, interviewing, setting the correct expectations with clear job descriptions, 90-day plans, measurable metrics, and regular communication to check progress against those metrics.

In the past I’ve hired people and knew they weren’t the right fit, but “dealt with it” for too long because the idea of finding a replacement seemed too daunting. Early on with Trainual, I let someone go after 3 days when it didn’t feel like the right fit, so I was at least getting more decisive. Our 15th employee was a head of people operations, and since then we’ve gotten extremely efficient and effective at building a rigorous hiring process (more on our blog!) so that the team members we do bring on are excellent.

During my high school years, I started by doing all the work. If you’ve ever read the E-Myth, I was the technician. But when I went to college, I couldn’t go to class and do the work too, so it forced me to delegate. I think this was an extremely fortunate lesson early on in my career that a lot of older entrepreneurs struggle to learn. But the sooner you can stop working on the day-to-day tasks in the business, the sooner you can focus your attention on solving the breakthrough problems that help you scale.

3 Likes

We actually get a lot more people signing up through the footer on our website that forwards to the affiliate program than we do through Partnerstack’s marketplace. I think that there is an army of business service providers that looks for tools to evangelize and make passive income, so the first step is having some program in place for them to find. We haven’t had to promote the program much.

We started with 20% commission early on to incentivize more sign ups, since Partnerstack suggested it would be competitive with their best programs.

Later, when we understood our funnel better (commissions, gross margin, marketing, affiliate support) we reduced the commission to be sure the economics worked. This type of widely advertised program is a good catch-all for DIY affiliates, but we engage partners with more influence and larger networks differently to make sure it’s as successful as possible.

2 Likes

Hey @chrisronzio,

Thank you for taking the time out for answering all the questions so candidly and for sharing so many of your personal tips! There are a ton of actionable insights in here and I’m sure it’s going to be super useful for everyone.

Personally I am in awe of this probabilistic (and inspiring) take: “if you only flip 5 times, it’s quite possible that all 5 times, you land on heads. But over time, the number of times that you land of each side of the coin begins to even out.” It’s incredibly insightful!

So glad we could host you and get to learn from your remarkable journey. Hope to have you join us again! And thank you again! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Also, a big thanks to @Anushree, @Akhilesh, @wingman4sales, @raviramani, @jamesgill, @Vengat, @angusbradley, and @aballabh for joining in today and making it a rather wonderful conversation. :raised_hands:

We’ll see you around for the next AMA soon. Stay tuned for more details!

4 Likes

Thank you for inviting me!

4 Likes

Thanks so much @chrisronzio for a detailed response! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Love the clarity in this distilled dichotomy, Chris: “If someone fails at an experiment, they’re getting closer to a solution. This helps you grow. If someone fails at a proven process, they didn’t have good instructions. This prevents you from growing.”

Thanks for sharing this and all the other great ideas here!

2 Likes

Thank you, Chris for the thoughtful answer.

So great to see how you saw the seeds of this during the consulting years. I like the aspect where you are repeatedly asking founders to get a deeper understanding of customers, where they buy, what podcasts they listen to etc., This first principles thinking is often overlooked and this is brilliant. As you mentioned in your response to @raviramani, this is a perfect example of what getting an intimate understanding of not just the customer problems but also the ecosystems that surround them, can lead to.

Thanks for taking the time!

2 Likes