Jay Haynes is the Founder & CEO of thrv, the first and only Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) software for product, marketing, and sales teams. Jobs-to-be-done product management helps CEOs align their product teams with customers to dramatically increase their effectiveness by reducing roadmap risk, accelerating revenue growth, and generating superior equity value.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“The biggest difficulty that I had, which is shared by other entrepreneurs, is capital. How are you going to fund the business? And this is even true at any of your stage because you ultimately continue to fund investment in whatever product or services you are developing to make sure that it generates revenue and profit and growth. For us it was a question of how are we going to fund and finance this business?”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice Book by Clayton M. Christensen and Karen Dillon and Taddy Hall and David S. Duncan
- How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain Book by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Favourite Quote:
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” Professor Theodore Levitt
Recommended Online Resources:
- “Marketing Myopia” Article by Theodore Levitt on HBR
- Clayton Christensen articles on HBR
- Harvard Business Review (HBR) – Find new ideas and classic advice on strategy, innovation and leadership, for global leaders from the world’s best business and management experts
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Customer empathy, customer empathy, customer empathy combined with mitigating risk. Always be focused on your customers and their problems independent of your product. Don’t ask them if they want a faster horse… Then the second is risk mitigation. So, make sure that you are mitigating risk. Don’t be an entrepreneur wants to take risk be an entrepreneur who wants to mitigate risk because that is the path to success. Then the final one was don’t run out of cash. Cash is king. All businesses fail because they run out of cash so don’t run out of cash”…[Listen for More]
More About Jay Haynes:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.” Epictetus
Other Quotes From the Chat with Jay Haynes:
- “You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”
- “I wanted that shortcut to understand customers… Companies talk to customers all of the time of course. But usually what they are doing is talking to customers about a product. Either their product or a competitor’s product and they are getting feedback on the product. And that’s okay, that can be useful. But the shortcut is really talking to customers about the goal they are trying to achieve, their job to be done as it is known today in innovation circles. And that really helps make a lot of decisions as an entrepreneur that are going to shorten the path to success”
- “There is a method… It’s hard to even call it a method… A term especially out here in Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs called ‘fail fast’. And you should get out there and build a product, ship it as fast as possible, fail and then iterate. And then hopefully you fail enough that and iterate and it leads to success. Now for us that’s totally insane. There is almost nothing else in the world where you would say okay the process, we are going to use is to just fail a whole bunch and see what works and hope that it leads to success. So, the shortcut is really avoiding failure at all costs and mitigating the risk that what you are going to build in your products and services isn’t valued by customers. And I think that’s incredibly important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind.”
- “Customer focus, customer focus, customer focus. I think that’s the number one because they are responsible for your success. Either you are successfully selling them a solution that they are willing to pay for or not. It’s pretty binary. And that’s true of even free products where you are ad driven, you just have advertising customers rather than consumers for example”
- “I think recognising that you have to put your ego aside. That’s just incredibly important. Because it’s not about Jay’s ideas or Neil’s ideas it’s about your customer and having the ability to listen to them, to empathise with them and help them overcome their struggles. That’s really what entrepreneurship is about. Most people would probably answer that and say entrepreneurship is about creating a great company. Well sure at the end of the day but how do you do that? You have to do that through your customers, you have to create customer value and you have to be able to empathise with them”
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