90: How Solo Entrepreneurs Can Improve Their Products and Businesses with Ben Foster

BiggerPockets Business Podcast

BiggerPockets

Business, Careers

4.8 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2021

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

You may own a small business, some rental properties, or are just tinkering with a new idea. Regardless of where you’re at in your entrepreneurial journey, you’re most likely trying to make something that will not only resonate with customers, but allow them to solve a problem in their life. So how do you make a product that accomplishes this to the fullest extent? Today we talk to Ben Foster, founder of Prodify and Chief Product Officer at WHOOP. Ben has been in this space for a long time, working with big names like eBay and Opower. After his initial success at corporate he founded his consulting firm, Prodify and has since then worked with 70+ different companies all tackling a common goal: make a great product. If you’re just starting out in your business, you may think the best course of action is to tack on as many useful features as possible into one product, but Ben warns against this. Companies that tend to do well with products are the companies that have a core competency and then build out from it. Great products also take market input from the customers that matter most. That doesn’t mean only the top 10% of users for an app, that means the bulk majority of customers who use the app. This is where many product teams get it wrong, and as you’ll see in the interview, there are a lot more caveats in product management than originally meets the eye. If you’re interested in product marketing, engineering, management or anything else related to building a great product, check out Ben’s book Build What Matters and of course, listen to this episode! In This Episode We Cover: What product management really is (and what the goal should be for teams) The difference between products for sale and product management What makes a great product team How to achieve (and go after) product market fit When to release the initial version of your product Which opinions matter most when collecting customer data Building an infrastructure so products can succeed from the start Bad product traits to avoid when building out your product And So Much More! Links from the Show Opower E-bay Dropbox Mint.com Intuit WealthFront Microsoft Amazon Hello Polar Watch Garmin LinkedIn Tesla LeapFrog Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/bizshow90 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	So, you want to be a marketer. It's easy. You just have to score a ton of leads and figure out a way to turn them all into customers. Plus manage a dozen channels, write a million blogs and launch 100 campaigns all at once. When that's done, simply make your socials go viral and bring in record profits. No sweat. Okay, fine. It's a lot of sweat. But with HubSpot's AI-powered marketing tools,
0:23.2	launching benchmark-breaking campaigns is easier than ever.
0:26.7	Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers.
0:30.7	This episode is brought to you by Vantar.
0:33.6	Stressing over cybersecurity,
0:35.3	whether you're a startup, growing fast, or already established.
0:38.6	Vanta can help you get ISO-27,001 certified and more.
0:43.6	Plus, it allows your company to centralize security workflows,
0:47.6	complete questionnaires up to five times faster,
0:50.2	and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team stay compliant.
0:54.3	Head to vanta.com slash Spotify to learn more.
0:58.4	Here's the truth about AI.
1:00.8	AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.
1:04.4	ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business,
1:08.3	removing friction and frustration for your employees,
1:12.7	supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier,
1:18.4	all built into a single platform you can use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow.
1:25.2	Visit ServiceNow.com slash UK slash AI for people.
1:28.9	Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Business Podcast show number 90.
1:34.7	If you think about all kind of like, you know, these best innovations, it's really a matter of
1:38.6	learning the space from scratch, being able to think outside the box about how that kind
1:43.4	of like space may
	...

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