2025.06.22

CV

[Come Here for Side Quests, The Big Idea, The Gap, Product Market Fit]

Thesis: One Big Idea that acts as a bridge between your product and customers is worth more than a million small ones.

[Come Here for Side Quests]

I heard that a couple of my friends were going to Electric Forest, a big music festival not 30 minutes from my home. Quite spontaneously, I decided to join them.

I'm glad I did. It was very refreshing. And, it was the first day off I took since February.

I might be the only person you know who went to this sort of music festival from only 2pm - 10pm (goes til sunrise), was sober the entire time (barring copious amounts of caffeine), and still had a lot of fun.

Other than spending time with a couple of friends who I have not seen in a while, some highlights include:

• I tried roller blading (I don't know how to roller blade)

• Got in a wrestling ring in front of ~100 people and was asked to give a couple of WWE style prefight speeches before losing a thumb war

• Spent an hour looking for dumplings before finally locating them (they were fried, rather than steamed, much to my chagrin)

• Took lot of cool photos

Aside from all of the fun, there was a really good marketing that stuck out to me a lot: a guy was holding a sign that said "Come Here for Side Quests."

Many people spoke with him, and for good reason--not only did he use trending language (side quest), but he also mapped it to the narrative that a lot of people at an event like that are very clearly trying to live out.

It was simple, clear, and elegant, and lined up with something I've been thinking about a bit... how do you communicate an offer in a way that sticks out from the crowd and actually resonates with people? Keep in mind, this Bacchanalia had hundreds of vendors, tens of thousands of people to watch, and every vice imaginable. Yet, I thought his sign was cool enough to write about.

And then, maybe more important with that, how do you make sure that the idea you communicate actually lines up with what you can deliver?

[The Big Idea]

George Lois, one of the real life inspirations for Don Draper, has a website where you can go through his ad campaigns. If you have not seen it, I strongly recommend you check it out here. For each campaign on his site, he includes some collateral (a video or photo) as well as the story behind the ad. There is often this notion of a "Big Idea," this very simple concept driving the ad.

One of the most iconic ads is a TV spot that shows a monkey using a xerox machine. Prior to the ad, it was hard for Xerox to communicate how easy it was to use their machine; all the other options were exceedingly complicated. So, the big idea is more or less, "It's so easy that a monkey can do it!"

Some others that I liked:

• An ad that compared Tommy Hilfiger to Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Perry Ellis (therefore, he must be at least as good as the others)

• MTV ad with pop stars saying "I want my MTV" to encourage the youth to call networks and request MTV (Be part of the revolution your favorite stars are behind)

• An ad for a TSA approved vial that can extract perfume from any other container (you can have ANY of your perfumes safely with you when you travel)

So, the question for us becomes, what's the BirdDog Big Idea? The truth is, we don’t know just yet.

I think we've probably already said it in a sales call or conversation or linkedin post, but we haven’t honed in on it & committed to it yet, which is very important. After all, the Big Idea drives a campaign or even a business, not a one off sign at Electric Forest.

A couple that have resonated:

• For $1/company/month, never miss a relevant update on a firm you are selling to

• Reorganize your entire CRM so your reps are only focusing on the best accounts

I think the Big Idea is somewhere in one of these directions—perhaps the latter is even a long term trojan horse for the former.

[The Gap]

Back in 2011, the Founder of Gong (over $300M ARR) wrote about a gap between when a user logs into a software product to do a thing and what it takes to achieve that desired outcome. Your goal as a founder is to reduce this gap as much as possible. But, I think you compound the difficulty of doing so when you have more than one "Big Idea."

Users come into BirdDog to do more than one thing right now. As a matter of fact, some use it for very different purposes. When this happens, it makes it harder for us to lower the gap.

If someone is using BirdDog to understand opportunities & risks in firms they are already talking to, the first thing they want to do is different than what someone who is trying to book 3 net new meetings a week wants to do. The first person might want to see the executive initiatives their buying committee is involved in, while the second person might want a pre written email they can send out in one click.

Both of those things require time and effort for us to build out in a way that’s just right for the users. While they are not mutually exclusive functionalities, driving the second user to get to the executive initiatives would be a turn off, and showing the first user an emal would also be a turn off.

With limited resources, it’s very hard to lower the gap (time to value) for both of these two things concurrently, either through product design or coaching. There’s too much surface area for us to manage! And, to boot, that same challenge of differing needs will continue throughout the lifecycle of the users.

Still, the gap must be lowered…

[Product Market Fit]

I wrote about Product Market Fit a few weeks ago. There are a lot of definitions people give for what it means, but I think a good one in the context of a “Big Idea” might be:

Product Market Fit is when you have a big idea that aligns your customer's desired outcomes with what your product can do.

If the guy with the side quest sign at Electric Forest was somehow the reason I ended up role playing as Randy Orton in front of 100 people, then he would have had Product Market Fit.

This definition puts maybe too much focus on the Big Idea, because both your product and your customers are variables as well. But, I think it makes sense for where BirdDog is at right now.

We’ve seen different customers get different wins with BirdDog, so we know it’s possible to use our software in very productive and high roi ways. But, we need to make it dead simple to repeatedly get those wins for customers with the same desires. Which becomes a lot easier when we are focused on communicating one Big Idea, one desired outcome.

The truth is, I wrote about this same challenge two months ago, and we still haven’t entirely resolved it yet. We’ve made a lot of improvements to our data and sales process & have increased revenues since then. However, we haven’t been testing the hypotheses as agressively as we should be.

Unfortunately, we were waiting to test some big ideas out by deploying capital to tweak the product after closing some specifc net new customers.

Well, they didn’t close.

We don’t need the capital to test it, though, it just would’ve made our lives easier. But, we certainlty didn’t sign up to do this because it would be “easy.”

No more waiting.

Live Deeply,