Startup founders spend a lot of time thinking about product, fundraising, and hiring. Far fewer spend enough time reworking the go-to-market assumptions they may have absorbed from an earlier startup era. In this episode of Startup Success, we’re joined by Marlena Sarunac, co-founder and fractional CMO at The Company Advice, to talk through what has changed and what founders should do next.
Marlena brings a rare combination of startup marketing depth and technical fluency. After starting her career at MasterCard, she moved into startups and later earned an engineering degree to better connect product and engineering work to market-facing language. She went on to lead marketing from Series A to Series B at Particle Health and build go-to-market strategies across HealthTech and InsurTech. Today, through The Company Advice, she helps startups clarify their category, sharpen their messaging, and build effective go-to-market strategies.
Why the old startup go-to-market playbook is breaking down
One of Marlena’s most useful reframes in the episode is that go-to-market is not a marketing task or a sales task. It’s an operational strategy that should involve the whole company. That distinction matters because many startups still run GTM like a relay race. Product builds. Marketing packages. Sales pitches. Customer success reports back. Then the cycle repeats.
That linear model used to be easier to sustain when capital was cheaper, buyers were less saturated, and startups could brute-force growth with spend. Founders could build an MVP, push out a splashy launch, run cold outbound, publish a flood of SEO content, and hire more reps as the momentum grew.
Marlena argues that this model is now much less reliable. Capital is tighter. Buyers are more skeptical. Tooling is more accessible, which means simply shipping something functional does not create much advantage. Investors also expect stronger operating discipline much earlier.
Instead of starting loud, she advises founders to start narrow. Rather than pushing a minimum viable product into the market and hoping volume solves the problem, startups should aim for what she calls a minimum remarkable product. In other words, build something that a specific group of customers genuinely cares about, then keep iterating based on real signals.
“You want to build a minimum remarkable product, not necessarily a minimum viable product.”
~Marlena Sarunac
That approach changes the goal. Rather than filling the funnel with everyone, the goal becomes attracting the right people, filtering out the wrong ones faster, and learning from the customers who truly value what you do.
This is especially important for early-stage teams that are tempted to chase every use case and feature request. A broad funnel can look encouraging on the surface, but it often creates a messy pipeline full of poor-fit prospects, distracting product requests, and internal confusion about where the company should focus. As Marlena points out, those one-off requests can quietly drain time and resources that a startup cannot afford to waste.
How the startup go-to-market playbook has changed
| Old GTM | New GTM |
|---|---|
| Build an MVP | Build a minimum remarkable product |
| Launch loudly | Start with a narrow audience |
| Push broad outbound | Lead with clear category and messaging |
| Fill the funnel with mixed-fit leads | Align teams around shared KPIs |
| Hire more reps | Reduce friction across the funnel |
| Raise more capital to keep the motion going | Grow through retention, referrals, and better signals |
| What happens: More noise, handoff friction, and pressure to grow through spend. | What happens: Better-fit buyers, stronger trust, and more sustainable traction. |
Why category clarity matters more than founders think
One of the strongest parts of the conversation is Marlena’s focus on market category. Many founders know their product well and know the problem they want to solve, but they have never clearly defined the category they want to lead.
That is a mistake because categories shape how buyers compare options, understand value, and decide what kind of company you are. If your startup does not define its category, the market will do it for you, and that often means you lose control of the story before a prospect even reaches your site.
“If you don’t define the category, the market will do it for you.”
~Marlena Sarunac
That risk is especially high for startups with large ambitions and evolving products. Founders may have a compelling long-term vision, but the product in market today may not fully support that broader narrative. The result is fuzzy positioning. The team starts describing the company in different ways depending on the audience, the conversation, or the latest customer feedback.
When that happens, buyers get confused. Your team gets inconsistent. Your marketing resets itself over and over. And your company starts competing on features instead of value.
Marlena explains that strong category definition creates leverage. It helps you move the conversation away from a shopping list of capabilities and toward the outcomes your product makes possible. It also makes your GTM efforts compound instead of restarting every quarter.
For founders, the practical lesson is simple: don’t assume category strategy is a later-stage branding exercise. It belongs much earlier. It influences messaging, pricing, sales conversations, website copy, and product roadmap discipline.
The hidden cost of inconsistent messaging in the age of AI
Founders have always needed clear messaging. Now the stakes are even higher because AI systems are also reading, interpreting, and classifying what your company says about itself.
Marlena makes an important point here. When startups put out inconsistent narratives, they don’t just confuse human buyers. They also confuse AI models pulling from the content available online.
That can create a new layer of positioning risk. If your homepage says one thing, your sales deck says another, and your thought leadership points in three more directions, then prospects and AI tools alike may struggle to understand what category you belong to, what problem you solve, and why you are different.
For startups trying to build trust, this matters. Buyers increasingly use AI-assisted research to evaluate vendors, compare products, and summarize markets. If those systems misclassify you, your startup can end up excluded from the very conversations where it should be considered.
Marlena’s advice is to create a dominant narrative and stick to it. That doesn’t mean oversimplifying your company or ignoring edge cases. It means deciding what your company most clearly stands for right now and expressing that in a way that repeats consistently across your website, sales materials, onboarding flows, and internal conversations.
Three exercises to tighten your messaging:
- Write a single category-defining sentence. Draft one sentence that clearly states who you help, what specific problem you solve, and what painful workaround or status quo you replace. This pushes the team to sharpen the company’s core narrative.
- Create a homepage headline that excludes the wrong audience. Write a headline that is specific enough to make an ill-fit prospect think, “This isn’t for me.” That kind of clarity helps attract better-fit buyers instead of filling the funnel with noise.
- Ask key stakeholders to answer the same question in one sentence. Have leaders across the company answer: What problem do we actually solve? If the answers vary widely, that is a sign your market is hearing mixed messages too.
When leaders inside the company aren’t aligned, the market won’t be aligned either. That confusion trickles down to buyers, sales conversations, onboarding, and even how AI tools interpret your business.
Messaging that translates features into customer value
One of the most practical insights in the episode is Marlena’s reminder that buyers don’t fall in love with features in the same way builders do. Founders, especially technical founders, can become attached to the mechanics of what they built. They know how hard the work was. They know why the architecture matters. They know the engineering breakthroughs behind the feature.
But buyers care first about what the product helps them do.
Marlena uses Apple and Slack as examples. Apple doesn’t lead by explaining display specs or chip details. It leads with the emotional and practical value of capturing memories beautifully and bringing content to life. Slack doesn’t market itself by focusing on channels or file sharing. It talks about staying connected, cutting email clutter, and improving team productivity.
That is the shift founders need to make. Great messaging translates product detail into business or customer value. It doesn’t bury the product. It interprets it.
For startup teams, that translation layer is often missing. Engineering may describe what was built. Product may describe how it works. Sales may describe what a prospect asked for. Marketing is left trying to unify all of it into a story the market can absorb. Without alignment, the result is fragmented messaging and weaker conversion.
Shared KPIs are the fix for team misalignment
Marlena repeatedly returns to the idea that go-to-market only works when teams are aligned around the same outcomes. This is one of the most valuable takeaways for founders because misalignment often hides inside otherwise strong teams.
When engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success all operate on separate KPIs, it becomes easy for each function to optimize for its own goals while hurting the broader growth motion. Marketing may chase lead volume. Sales may push for quick wins. Product may respond to noisy requests. Engineering may prioritize different measures of success entirely.
Founders often don’t realize how much damage this causes until friction shows up everywhere: mixed messages in the market, roadmap sprawl, weak conversion, unhappy handoffs, and a team that feels busy without moving together.
Marlena argues for de-siloing the company and getting teams laser-focused on the target customer. Shared KPIs help create that common direction. They push departments to think beyond handoffs and start thinking about how the full journey works, from acquisition to onboarding to retention.
That kind of alignment is also how startups reduce waste. When everyone is working from the same growth logic, the company gets better at spotting which initiatives drive traction and which ones just generate activity.
How to find the growth blockers hiding in plain sight
For founders who suspect something is off in their funnel but can’t quite pinpoint it, Marlena highlighted The Company Advice’s Friction Finder tool as a practical starting point.
The premise is straightforward. Startups often lose growth not because of one dramatic failure, but because of many small friction points that pile up over time. Your website may be promising the right things, but your onboarding may be confusing. Your product may be strong, but buyers may not know what to click first. Your messaging may attract interest, but your follow-through may not reinforce trust.
Each of those moments creates leakage.
The Friction Finder helps founders evaluate different parts of the customer journey across marketing, website experience, and product flow. By answering a set of simple questions, founders get a clearer sense of where buyers may be getting stuck and where the company may be quietly losing revenue.
The value here is in helping teams prioritize. A founder can use the findings to guide a leadership discussion, focus the next sprint, or identify where outside help may make sense.
That makes the tool particularly useful for startups that feel they have traction but aren’t converting or retaining customers as well as they should. Often the issue is not market demand alone. It’s friction layered into the path between interest and value.
What founders should do next
Taken together, Marlena’s advice points to a more disciplined and more sustainable way to grow.
Founders should:
- Narrow their focus instead of broadening it too early.
- Define their category before the market does it for them.
- Build one clear narrative and repeat it consistently across channels.
- Align the company around shared growth metrics rather than departmental wins.
- Examine friction across the customer journey, because hidden blockers can undermine a strong product.
There is also a broader leadership lesson in her closing advice. Founders can’t scale while acting as the “Chief Everything Officer” forever. Real growth requires trusting the team, letting expertise surface, and laying solid operational groundwork before the flood of users and revenue arrives.
That patience may not feel glamorous, but it’s often what separates durable companies from fragile ones.
Our thanks to Marlena Sarunac for sharing such a valuable and practical framework for startup go-to-market. Her perspective gives founders a clearer way to think about positioning, messaging, alignment, and growth in a market that has changed dramatically. For founders who want help clarifying their category, sharpening their message, or identifying the friction points holding back growth, The Company Advice offers practical support built for startups in the thick of it. You can also explore their Friction Finder tool for a simple way to spot hidden blockers across your website, product, and customer journey.
00:01
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world, stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Kate 00:19
Today on the podcast, I am joined by Marlena Sarunac. Marlena is the co-founder and a fractional CMO at The Company Advice. The Company Advice offers fractional marketing and design support for startups. After leading marketing from Series A to Series B at Particle Health, and building go-to-market strategies across HealthTech and InsurTech, Marlena now helps startups clarify their category, sharpen their messaging and build go-to-market strategies that actually convert. In this episode, we unpack what’s changed in go-to-market, why category clarity matters more than ever, and how founders can cut through the noise to build sustainable traction. Please welcome Marlena Sarunac from The Company Advice. So Marlena, it’s great to have you on the show. Thank you for being here.
Marlena 01:23
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Kate 01:25
So I think it would be helpful. You have a great background, if you wouldn’t mind walking us through your experience, and then that can kind of, if you can share how it led to the founding of The Company Advice.
Marlena 01:38
Everyone’s founding origin story can be long, if you allow it to be. I went to Lehigh University for my undergrad. I thought I was pre-law, and I ended up finding myself in a marketing consulting role at MasterCard. And so I started my career in corporate, and then right after corporate, I jumped into the world of startups. At that time, not to age myself too terribly, but like, startups were just like, not part of, like, everyday vernacular, at least now in the East Coast. To my immigrant parents, I think that they were shocked and horrified that I was leaving, like a really nice corporate job to take a leap into the unknown. However, I just love the space so much, and I really loved building in it. I’ve been marketing in some capacity in this space ever since. I actually went back and I got an engineering degree so that I could better connect the dots between product and eng to market facing language and market facing audiences. So I’m fully invested in the space. And so after having a career in various leadership roles at various startups, mostly pretty technical, highly regulated industries, from InsureTech to HealthTech, I met my partner at my last job. We worked together really well to bring that brand and that product to life. And so we spun out The Company Advice, and we have been in business now for a few years. And we consult lots of startups on their go-to-market, their brand, their narrative, product strategy. So we work with a lot of different types of founders and verticals, and just really love what we do. We love getting it on the ground level and making a real difference. And applying a playbook that is very efficient for founders to, you know, start getting market signals so that they can start making really smart choices about their business.
Kate 03:35
That’s so great, because I interact with a lot of founders, and they know a lot about their product, their particular market, but not so much about marketing and some of the other things. And so when they can leverage fractional help in this way, I think it’s terrific. And I’m super impressed that you got an engineering degree, because lots of times there’s a disconnect between marketing and engineering that happens a lot in startup culture, so you must be able to really help with that.
Marlena 04:04
I think you really need that connective tissue and someone who can translate engineering speak into market speak. And that’s definitely my secret sauce. It is definitely my superpower. Ever since I was little, my dad is a PhD engineer, and I was looking over his slide decks and his presentations and proposals and making sure that they, you know, weren’t too in the weeds. And so I think I’ve just always had that kind of ability to be that translation layer. So I’m really happy to be able to do that you know as a living,
Kate 04:36
For sure, that is a superpower. How beneficial for your clients. That’s great. So let’s kind of get into it by starting with go-to-market. It’s really changed, right?
Marlena 04:48
Yeah.
Kate 04:49
It’s fundamentally shifted. If you wouldn’t mind kind of walking us through how it’s shifted and where it kind of stands today.
Marlena 04:57
Yeah, definitely, you know, and like, just to take a step back in terms of how I think about or talk about go-to-market. Go-to-market is an operational strategy. It’s not just a thing that happens on, like the marketing and sales side. It’s truly an entire operational strategy that the company as a whole, all hands on deck need to be involved to launch a product to reach your target customers and ultimately to win sales. And so I think that in a conventional go-to-market, there’s like a pass, like a handoff that happens between departments with competing KPIs, competing systems, and just like their own different operational way of doing things. It has like a very linear path, traditionally. You build an MVP, you blast it out with a big PR launch. You spend a lot of money on cold outbound, you know, whether that’s through advertising, through your sales reps, through whatever systems that you are leveraging. You write SEO bait content, because you know that content is important, so you start putting stuff on the website you may or may not hit your target ARR, that kind of you know, shows in your mind PMF, and you keep growing by hiring more sales reps to capitalize on like this motion. And then you have to keep generating more marketing leads to feed this hungry army of sales reps. And then ultimately, you have to raise more money so you can continue doing all of this stuff. And that’s kind of like the ultimate or external signal that you’re doing well. And I think that a lot of that has been changing. I think that right now we’re in an environment where capital is much more constrained than it used to be. There’s so much tooling out there, and there’s so much more operational rigor that’s expected out of companies earlier in their life cycle. So things that used to pass to be a Series A company are no longer passing. You have to start demonstrating a certain level of sophistication, operational sophistication, earlier on. And so the new go-to-market is really, it’s, it’s, it’s five things at a high level that I can walk you through really quickly. One, start narrow, not loud. And by that, I mean you want to start, you want to build a minimum remarkable product, not necessarily a minimum viable product. Now, with all of this, like tooling that’s out there, there’s vibe coding. A lot of tooling is commoditized building things and what you need to build needs to be truly remarkable, and then be prepared to iterate on that. And in terms of storytelling, instead of, like, a big, splashy PR, you know, push, you really want to lead with the product and produce effective storytelling that is attracting the right audience – not everyone, but the right people. And the way you know that you’re doing a good job with this is that you the right people are saying yes, and the wrong people are saying no quickly, so you don’t you’re not clogging, clogging the funnel and clogging your own internal teams with conversations that are never going to go anywhere. Also, PMF is now proven more so with strong retention and word of mouth as opposed to just reach and you can grow a really strong operations and expediting function in your startup, in your company, that’s able to quickly test and grow potential channels, as opposed to having a big, laborious movement in one direction toward one target. Really figure out who the right customers are like, who are like the real champions, who love your product and find out what it is that they love about you and how to find more of that similar to your audience, which sounds obvious, but it isn’t always obvious when founders are in the mindset that their solution can be so many things to so many people. By practicing this discipline of thinking a little bit more narrowly, I think that you will find more success in the current market.
Kate 08:54
I don’t think that’s obvious, because otherwise, your funnel gets filled with people that are never going to convert right?
Marlena 09:02
They’re never going to convert. There’s always going to be feature requests. Your roadmap is never going to be able to actually move forward, because you’re always going to be bogged down by one-off requests, by one-off customer types that you’re never going to be able to replicate. And that’s a huge time and resource suck for early stage companies.
Kate 09:22
Exactly. And a lot of first time founders just think, Oh, the more the better, without thinking about that.
Marlena 09:28
Correct. Exactly. Kate. The fourth thing is aligning the teams around shared metrics. I really always, almost always, see a lot of misalignment on shared KPIs across the company. I think it’s really important where it pertains to go-to-market, that you de-silo the company as much as possible and make sure that there’s a unified front that’s completely laser-focused on the target customer. And then the last piece is you can stay capital efficient in a lot of ways, through automation, through AI there’s really no excuses in this current day and age. I think it’s really important then, instead of thinking about how to raise the next round, to figure out, in fact, how to maintain capital optionality. This is how you’re going to control your destiny. And ultimately, I think, hot take the less board members you have in the room like better off you will be mental health-wise. So I think that by maintaining capital optionality and not being so reliant, obviously, on capital raises, I think that you will be better off, your company will be better off, and what you’re building will be better off.
Kate 10:32
Yes, and you’ll get to preserve some more equity too, selfishly. So I like something that you said a few times about go-to-market, and that’s the shared KPIs, and it’s a company-wide operational strategy, because the startups that I’ve been a part of that have failed, that was the problem. You know, marketing and sales had KPIs, and engineering and product had different ones, and the two conflicted and couldn’t keep up with each other, and that was the demise both times.
Marlena 11:09
And, you know, as someone sitting in the marketing seat, so I actually have, like, a fun schematic that I show in a webinar format of this conversation, where you could show the typical cycle of go-to-market, where the C-suite is directing engineers to build something, then it gets handed off to product. Product tells marketing about it. Marketing creates the campaigns around it. They basically arm sales with the necessary materials. Sales hands off to customer success. Customer Success comes back with feedback to the C-suite and then, like the whole cycle kind of rinses and repeats. But really the department that’s on the receiving end of the most amount of battery and feedback is really marketing because we’re hearing it from the C-suite, we’re hearing it from product, we’re hearing it from sales, we’re hearing it from customer success. So like, all the arrows always end up pointing down at the marketing department, and the KPIs for the marketing department are also not always aligned with everyone else. So then sometimes the marketing department acts a little bit selfishly in some ways. So you just don’t want that. Like, why do you have all these – the point of having a company is not to have competition between the teams, right? That’s silly.
Kate 12:15
Right, and so siloed. That’s extremely helpful to point out. I want to go back to something you know, you said earlier that we talked a little bit about, and we can delve into it more. And that’s the importance of, like, narrowing down to a really clear category. Can we expand on that?
Marlena 12:33
It’s funny to me, how, how often I’ll ask a team, a founding team, you know, like, what market category do you think you’re operating in? And then they asked me, What’s a market category? You know, category leadership, what it unlocks when it’s done correctly, is categories really shape how buyers think and compare and decide between service and offerings and products. And if you don’t define the category, the market will do it for you. And because most buying decisions are made before someone ever even visits your website, frankly, you don’t want this definition to precede you. You want to be able to tell your own story on your own grounds. And when you are leading in the category, and you understand your category really well, you now have leverage. You can set the rules for competition. You can shift conversations to not be so focused on what features you offer, but rather the outcomes that your customers can benefit from. And you spend a lot less time explaining and more time closing the deal. So your marketing efforts around all of this, and your go-to-market function is able to compound on this momentum, as opposed to, like, resetting every quarter, because you’re kind of, like reinventing yourself, or reinventing where you are or you’re you’re not really understanding or realizing how the market is shifting around you. You know, being a category king” is very attractive to some companies, and that’s what they strive for. A “category king” is really powerful in that it provides a completely new way for customers to live, think, do their business, and you also end up owning often more than 76% of the market valuation with other companies, like really kind of, like competing for, like, the scraps remaining in this space. And like, some examples like that are really obvious. Are like, Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, these are all category leaders, Salesforce, Zoom. It’s really difficult now to come out with like, a competitor to Slack or to Netflix like, that’s the king right now. And now we have, like new kings that are emerging, you know, OpenAI, we’ve got Figma, we have Notion, Loom. So it’s a really interesting space, and they’ve all built new categories that we haven’t really thought about, you know, 5-10, years ago. So I think it’s really a really exciting place to be and exciting framework to think about. But if you want to be the leader in your category, you have to market how you are creating value.
Kate 15:12
I think that’s so important. I really struck me when you said, if you don’t like define it and you’re clear on it, the market will for you, and I think even more so now with AI and ChatGPT, because founders tell me that ChatGPT will convey what their brand what their category is, right, so based on what they’re putting on their website, so you’ve got to be really clear on it right now.
Marlena 15:35
Totally. Yeah. So I actually run exercises sometimes, because founders do get stuck here because oftentimes, here’s the thing, like founders have really big ambitions and really big, compelling visions, but your product isn’t always going to match the rate at which your vision is for where you want your company to go and your product to go. And so the short-term narrative is where things get really fuzzy. And when you have a product that is doing well, and you have customers, this is creating a lot of like, true stories. Like you’re hearing all of this buzz and how people are using it and stuff, but you don’t know which one to focus on as your primary narrative, and marketing team doesn’t know. Like, they’re all kind of trying out different things based off all the things that you’re hearing from your users. You need to, like, pick a dominant narrative, because when you have all these inconsistent narratives, it confuses not only buyers, but AI models that are training on whatever is out there. So AI models now are misclassifying you because they don’t know what you’re saying, because what you’re putting out there is all over the place. So you have a lot of things working against you now in this, like, new in this new era.
Kate 16:51
Wow. So you have to be really clear on what you want to be, and then how do you develop the clear messaging around that?
Marlena 17:00
Yeah, so, you know, I think working with somebody who’s in this space, you know, cough, cough, me, but like, you know, anyone who’s, like, really good at taking an objective stance at this and coming with a playbook and asking you questions that maybe sometimes you don’t want to ask yourself, or your team doesn’t want to ask of themselves. But you know, like, there are some, like, really easy exercises that you can do, even without me, where you can sit down and write one sentence that helps you define this category. So, like, we help a specific audience solve a specific problem without an existing pain or work around like, what is that thing? And you can just sit down and do that exercise. Another founder action is writing a homepage headline that intentionally excludes someone. Oh, so if a prospect reads it and says that’s not for me, that’s actually a win. (Interesting.) Another thing that I do, you know, that I end up, you know, facilitating, is doing a workshop with the team, with the key stakeholders on the team, and we talk for 30 minutes – What problem do we actually solve in one sentence? And I would say 9.9 out of 10 times, the answers are widely varying. And if your own key stakeholders are all saying different things, your market is also hearing different things. So again, that trickles down to everything your buyers, AI, ChatGPT, etc.. So just getting, like, firm, firm, firm alignment is really at the core of finding that narrative.
Kate 18:36
And so in these “category kings” that you mentioned, great examples of how they have that right, like their messaging is so clear.
Marlena 18:46
Yeah. I mean, one of the examples I love to give is Apple. You know, if you think about, like an iPhone, and you think about the camera, and you know, if, if Apple just told us, like, what the features were, you have a Retina display, you have a bionic chip, you have 48 megapixels. Okay, but you never see that in Apple marketing. What you see is you get to capture your most important memories in stunning detail. You have a display that brings everything you love to life. That is a wildly different way of talking about a Retina display, right? (Yes) Or Slack, like Slack’s features are they have channels, they have integrations, you can share files, but that’s not what they lead with. What they lead with is you can stay connected with your team, no matter whether they are or you can reduce email clutter, increase productivity. Like it’s such a different mind shift from Oh, but we built channels, okay, but that’s not like what’s market differentiating. That’s not what made them the king. What made them the king was being able to really connect the value of what they built with the buyer.
Kate 19:55
I think those are great examples, because I think the founders listening can really see with those examples the difference between the two and where you want to be in your messaging,
Marlena 20:10
Right, right? And it’s really hard when you’re in the weeds and when you know how much blood, sweat and tears went into building that feature, and you just want to, you know, tell everyone about it. If you don’t know how to turn that Retina display into look at all of these beautiful moments that you love so much come to life on your phone. If you can’t translate that, then you need help. You need someone who can step in and help you bring that to life.
Kate 20:31
Absolutely, because a lot of founders have that engineering background and they’re so excited about the technology and the development. Let’s use your example of the retina feature they want to lead, but they want to lead with that. I’ve seen it so many times because they personally are excited about it.
Marlena 20:50
Absolutely, absolutely, yeah.
Kate 20:53
So is that, you know, on The Company Advice, you have a Friction Finder tool. Walk us through that, because I think that might be a good resource too, for people listening.
Marlena 21:04
Yeah, there’s a Friction Finder. It’s really simple. You as a founder, can go in and basically key in on different areas of your marketing, promotion, your website, and your product, and we ask some pretty simple questions that, depending on your responses, just spits out a score and tells you, like, where these points of friction are, where buyers might be getting stuck. You can kind of key in pretty quickly on whether you know maybe your maybe your marketing website is saying all the all the greatest things, but the onboarding flow in your product isn’t very clear. Like people don’t understand where to click first when they open your application. There can be a lot of these little friction points, and they build up. And when they build up, you have a leaky funnel, and you’re losing revenue. And so the Friction Finder is just like a simple little tool designed to help you kind of key in on that, and then you can use that to, you know, set the next leadership meeting with your team to talk about it and to zero in on it. Or, you know, helps you decide whether you need, like a consultant or someone to help you take some of that off your plate and figure out how to optimize those areas.
Kate 22:16
What a helpful resource. So for founders listening, it’s the Friction Finder. It’s at The Company Advice, your website. What’s that URL?
Marlena 22:26
The URL, it’s, it’s pretty simple. It’s TheCompanyAdvice.com. And you’ll be able to zero in on that Friction Finder right in our navigation.
Kate 22:35
Love it. And so Marlena, we always wrap up this show, one of our most popular questions we ask our guests, any last words of advice for the founders listening that you can share?
Marlena 22:47
You know, I think knowing that you have invested so much into this baby, the people who you’ve hired around you to help bring that baby, you know, raise that baby with you, because it takes a village. (Yes.) You know, I think it’s important to allow their areas of expertise to really shine. I think it’s really easy to step into the Chief Everything Officer role, but if you really want to scale, and if you really want to be able to step away from founder-led sales, and you really want this thing to take off, sometimes like loosening the reins and hearing out your individual team expertise could come to your benefit. Hopefully you made the right hires so that is coming to your benefit. But trust yourself and trust your team. And I think that a lot of founders would be happier if they knew that there’s some steps that need to be taken, operational steps, fundamental, foundational steps, need to be taken before the full vision comes to life. And that is okay, and that is necessary, because without that, you don’t want to have a house of cards that collapses at that pivotal moment when you’re actually seeing something exciting happen. You want to have the groundwork laid out. You want to have good systems in place to withstand that flood that everybody wants to create, right, that flood of users and revenue, so be patient.
Kate 24:16
Excellent advice, and you’re so right. When we have VCs on here, when they talk about the successful startups they invested in, it’s always about the team, right? And the founders that built a great team and then leaned into that team. So thank you so much. I encourage everyone listening to go check out The Company Advice website and that Friction Finder tool. You did a great job of explaining something more complicated than people think and like to your point, not a lot of founders know even what a category is. You did a great job of kind of explaining it all and then helping us see the bigger framework of a successful go-to-market strategy. And really highlighted some things like about company wide KPIs and things that I don’t think is out there very much. This was a really great conversation. Thank you.
Marlena 25:09
Thank you. I mean, I love nerding out on this. It’s a passion of mine, so I love talking about it. So I invite any questions or conversations for the conversations on the topic.
Kate 25:19
Great. I can tell you know your stuff. Thank you so much for being here today.
Marlena 25:23
Thank you.
25:26
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