Erwan Derlyn’s Post

Highly recommended resource for startup founders on their product/market fit journey, put together by the team at First Round Capital. Instead of the often too general and binary approach to the PMF concept, they offer a nuanced and systemic method with actionable building blocks. 👾 Multiple levels: PMF isn't a single point in time but a never-ending game with many levels—Nascent, Developing, Strong, and Extreme. 🧩 Multidimensional: There's no single definitive metric for measuring PMF. It's a complex function of market demand, customer satisfaction, and business efficiency. 🕹️4 Levers: While some elements, like competition and market behavior, are beyond your control, you can experiment with changing your Persona, Problem, Promise, or Product (4Ps). Very much in line with what we discussed in your pod, Joni Lindgren, wdyt?

I have been sharing my thoughts online in one form or another pretty much since the start of my career in the early 2010s. As an indie consultant, it's an essential part of establishing credibility in my niche. But as AI tools went mainstream and our feeds were flooded with AI-generated content, I mostly went silent and started questioning the value of sharing content online. How can I differentiate if we can't tell the difference between human-generated and AI-generated content? Will my audience notice and appreciate the effort I put into creating content, or will they think AI just effortlessly generated it? This blog post is not an ultimate guide, it doesn't offer any ready-made answers or templates. My hope is that it will give you some food for thought and maybe even start a conversation. Tom Critchlow calls it a riff. I'm not sure if this post qualifies, but thanks for the inspiration!

I've been teaming up with Jacob Key and Luminar Ventures for a while, now on the basketball court too 🏀. If you're interested in joining some pick-up games in Stockholm for some friendly competition and making new connections, shoot me a DM and I'll let you know the time and location. All levels and genders are welcome. N.B: Pitch decks stay on the bench 😀!

Apparently I made one of the most popular Miro templates of 2023 👀 Quick backstory: I often recommend that startup founders focus on leveraging existing channels, rather than spending too much time building their own. But I also need to walk the walk, so I often run experiments on my own. This is one of them. 1️⃣ I did some keyword research to identify the most searched-for marketing templates. 2️⃣ I was looking for a strong domain that could rank faster than my own website - Miro was an obvious choice here since I use their product on a daily basis, and they were promoting their template marketplace (Miroverse). 3️⃣ Based on my keyword findings, I looked for gaps in Miro's library of marketing templates and created 2: a funnel template and a TAM template. 4️⃣ Published, did 0 promotion, and actually forgot about it until I received an email from Miro telling me that some of my templates had become some of the most popular on their platform. 7,000+ viewers and 1,000+ users, not bad! This isn't another LinkedIn humble brag, but a concrete example of how you can leverage stronger existing channels to reach your target audience. And a good reminder for me to publish more templates on Miro.... Let me know if you have any ideas!

If you too have kids under the age of 10, you know how much they've been looking forward to opening their Advent calendars today. This gave me the idea to experiment with the recently introduced custom GPTs. As Sam Altman admitted in the New York Times, GPTs are still pretty "embarrassing" at the moment as they can't do advanced tasks, and for most use cases, the classic version is better. But I think most marketers should already experiment with them, as they are likely to become a go-to lead generation tool. I can easily see them soon embedded on websites, similar to Intercom chats, replacing static forms, calculators, or mini-tools generally used for this purpose. Mine here is basic: as the name suggests, it'll give you a marketing advice every day leading to Christmas. Oh, and there's a special gift that won't be revealed until December 24th unless you manage to get GPT to spill the beans (easy). Beyond the structure of the answers, I don't even know what topics will be covered, nor the quality of the advice offered. So here's a disclaimer. 😅 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘶𝘳𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘶𝘱𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘦. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘭𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴. Feel free to try it out and share some results (good or bad) by tagging me or replying to this post. All you need to access it is a ChatGPT Plus subscription. 🕯️ Happy Advent Sunday! 🔗 Link in comments.

Insightful fireside chat with Jacob Key and Magnus Bergman at Startup Grind Nordics yesterday. As someone who's been part of the extended team at Luminar Ventures since 2019, I can tell that they are truly dedicated to supporting founders beyond what you'd expect from early-stage investors. A key takeaway for founders, as Magnus pointed out, is to understand the game they're playing, whether it's with investors, employees, or customers. The rules and players of the game are constantly changing, and the best founders stay curious and adapt along the way. Jacob gave a concrete example: when you send out a pitch deck, don't overcomplicate things; the goal of the pitch is not to get an investment but to get a first meeting. The goal of that meeting (often with a junior associate) is to get the message across to the investment committee, and so on and so forth. Thanks to Naimul Abd and Startup Grind for organizing. The ecosystem needs more open and accessible events focused on early stage. I look forward to the next one with Hannah Meiton and Adrian Iredahl from Ampli Ventures!

The promise of AI tools is naturally appealing to resource-constrained startups. Now that there's an AI tool for every marketing need, it can be tempting to let AI run your marketing on autopilot. But collecting tactics without a strategy is a risky way to go. More on that and tips for using ChatGPT to make better strategic decisions in my latest post: https://lnkd.in/dzMqNEZx

It was fun to guest on one of my favorite podcasts, #Datadrivet. Joni Lindgren and I talked about Product-Market Fit (PMF) and tried to make it easy to understand and as actionable as possible. We discussed the limitations of the concept, looked at different ways to approach it, and may have even coined a new framework, FOMO or PMF... I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. 🎧 Check it out wherever you listen to podcasts (links in comments). For startups reading this, don’t miss previous episodes with Carl Lager and Andreas Quensel, lots of useful takeaways.

Ok, this may not age well, but time will tell 😅. It's been almost a year since ChatGPT launched, sparking the generative AI frenzy. While AI tools are certainly proving to be useful co-pilots for marketers creating/summarizing content and interpreting data, I've yet to come across an early-stage startup that has used generative AI to drive marketing efforts with significant results that couldn't have been achieved otherwise. I'm not looking for examples of startups that have casually used it to create content (social posts, blogs, videos...), but those that have built entire and repeatable marketing processes around it. Looking at more established companies, LinkedIn, for example, has launched collaborative articles supported by user-generated content with impressive SEO results (even if content quality is questionable, IMHO). Do any early-stage startup marketing initiatives come to mind? I'd like to be proven wrong here before I delve deeper into the topic on my blog.

I think PR is an underrated channel for early-stage startups, often overlooked compared to advertising. Without an established track record, startups need a way to quickly build trust to attract their first customers. That's where PR comes in. For this post, I've invited my former colleague Clara Armand-Delille, Founder of ThirdEyeMedia, to share her best PR tips for startups. We'll also be co-hosting a hands-on workshop for those who want to take their PR game to the next level. A big thank you to Clara for taking the time to share her valuable insights.