Crossing the chasm between your product and your customer.

Why I started First Impression and what you can expect when you subscribe.

Let me start with a confession. I came up with at least a dozen excuses not to start this substack newsletter. I wallowed in these excuses for a good few weeks. Then the provocateur in my home, otherwise known as my partner, said, “you won’t have any regrets if you didn’t do it, right?”

So here I am.

This could bomb. Or worse, fizzle. But at least I won’t be sitting at my desk wondering.

I’m going to tell you a little story. I came to Silicon Valley in the late nineties, drawn to this shiny new thing called the Internet. I’d just graduated from this amazing program at Northwestern University, where it was drilled into my brain that it was all about the customer, stupid. I was a believer (still am!) and came to the Valley to apply what I’d learned in this amazing program. Turns out no one cared. Silicon Valley’s mantra, at that time at least, was build and they will come. It was, I learned quickly, all about the product, stupid.

Tech gets product. It’s almost a science now. Many founders are technical founders, and they can build amazing stuff. But when it comes to marketing, it’s still a black box. To make matters worse, there’s a ton of clickbaity content out there on How to____ (fill in your favorite marketing question). And to make it even more confusing, what works for one startup may simply not work for another. And that’s why I hate playbooks. The idea of having a sequence of steps you can just download and apply to your startup feels reductive and somewhat insulting to the unique idea that the founders are trying to birth. Please don’t get me wrong: I do not mean that powerful, time-tested principles and frameworks don’t work. They work when they are applied thoughtfully and deliberately to your startup. Unfortunately, that is not how most playbooks are used.

I have spent the last twenty-something years reconciling and bridging these two world views of product-first and customer-first. And in doing so, I have accumulated a lot of knowledge and experience about how to align the essence of what a founder envisions with the essence of the problem that a customer experiences. When that connection magnetizes, magic happens. We call it FIT. But PMF is just the beginning. There are many startups that found PMF and still failed. The reasons may be many, but so many of them revolve around product and marketing. And if I can help first-time founders of early-stage startups get that part right, I should, yes?

I’ve been working with founders for a long time. I have helped them understand their users, position their startups, articulate their story, figure out their GTM strategy, and launch successfully. In this First Impression newsletter, I want to share some of these strategies and approaches to help as many first-time founders (particularly technical founders) as possible.

If you like what you’ve read, then please subscribe. It's the single most important thing you can do to support me. If you have already subscribed, then THANK YOU! I hope you’ll find the stuff I write about useful. If you know first-time founders who can benefit from my newsletter, then please share it. It is completely free.

If you’d like to drop me a note, you can reach me at hema@padhugroup.com or find me on LinkedIn, where I’ll share my posts.