At BoS we don’t tend to default to idolising the kind of rapid and massive growth Valley culture thrives on. Mainly because it feels often driven by ego and valuation rather than solving a genuine market problem.

The ability to scale however is one of the attractive features of software after all, so when we come across a good scale-up or growth story we love getting our teeth into it.

Jason VandeBoom‘s talk from BoS Spring was one such example where he spoke about his journey of “bootstrapping” to over a thousand people at Active Campaign. The focus there was primarily on finance, management, and the entrepreneur’s personal journey.

This time we’ve got something different for you.

Cazoo’s Growth Story

Have you heard of Cazoo? If you’re outside the UK you’ll be forgiven if you haven’t because they were only founded in 2018 and launched a used-car sales platform in December 2019. Since then, in just around two years, they’ve become a force to be reckoned with.

Sure they’ve raised £450M and they’re valued at the $2B mark. Yes they’ve become the main sponsors of Aston Villa, Everton, and the World Snooker Tour (again those outside the UK will be forgiven for not knowing exactly who those football team are).

The thing that really piqued our interest what that they managed to maintain a core and healthy company culture while hiring upwards of two thousand people into their organisation since 2018.

If you work in a team or manage a group of people you’ll undoubtedly have experienced ups, downs, and disagreements. In many cases these are resolved in the normal course of work.

Issues like a team member going through a down period, a product roadmap being unclear, or a change in leadership can have a negative effect on team morale. But these kinds of problems, being products of circumstances, are very often relatively easily fixed. Or if not exactly “easily”, at least the underlying causes and possible solutions are not that hard to identify and implement.

“Team disharmony” however is when performance problems persist and grow within a team. Even though there may not be obvious, or easily diagnosable, causes.

A few years ago I attended a day-long investment workshop. Part of the event was focused on raising capital for the purposes of international expansion. The speaker used an example from his native Denmark to illustrate the pitfalls of taking a brand global.

Name Change

Dansk Olie og Naturgas (meaning Danish Oil and Natural Gas) was one of the major energy players in Denmark. As the company tried to establish a larger presence in the UK and other English-speaking countries they encountered a problem. When presented with the company’s name, acronymised to DONG, folks would, ahem, react oddly.

In 2017 they changed their name to Ørsted, citing the fact that they no longer supplied oil or gas. I have no reason to disbelieve that story but I can bet that their marketing teams sighed a sigh of relief at not having to tiptoe around that name anymore.

While the DONG story is largely clickbait, it does serve a useful purpose.

In this conversation with Fall 2021 and USA 2019’s BoS speaker Teresa Torres, Mark Littlewood digs into her latest on customer discovery and what to expect in her new book and her BoS Fall talk Continuous Discovery Habits.

Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. She has taught over 7,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy. 

This week on the BoS Podcast Sarah McVittie talks about data collecting and the culture of fashion.

In this talk from BoS Europe 2019, Sarah discusses why Dressipi started as a B2C play but the data it collected on customers has a much higher value to fashion retailers as it enables them to forecast demand more effectively and reduce their unsold inventory. 

You will leave with ideas to stimulate creative, data-driven, approaches to problem solving and how you can harness culture to build long-term value in your business.

In this guest post Paul Kenny (founder of Ocean Learning and long time BoS participant and speaker) argues that software and SaaS “proven sales playbooks” are BS.

Paul writes:

I’ve spent the best part of 30 years thinking about ways to help salespeople to get better, to develop more from their customer base and to have satisfying and enjoyable sales careers.

Over that time, we have become much more sophisticated in collecting and analysing sales data. We know who our salespeople talk to, when, for how long, what about and in what level of progress they make. Our CRM system can prompt the team to make the optimum number of calls, to follow up efficiently and to be better at predicting call or demo outcomes. 

1. What is Jobs-To-Be-Done? (Definition)
2. Free Online Articles and Resources
3. Books about Jobs-To-Be-Done
4. JTBD Masterclasses by BoS

If you’re running a software company (or somehow involved in strategy) you’ll be familiar with the conversations and debates about what the “next killer feature (or product)” is going to be.

While there are very few silver bullets in life, the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework is an indispensable tool in answering those kinds of questions.

The reason is that the JTBD framework (used and applied correctly) helps entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers clearly understand what “job” customers are trying to accomplish. This in turn helps you create products (or features or marketing campaigns) that resonate with customers and align with their goals.

1. Background
2. The Survey Questions
3. Results: The Numbers
4. Results: Anecdotes
5. BoS Commentary
6. More Resources

At our Spring 2021 Conference in April the future of the workplace was, unsurprisingly, a hot topic. We had two important keynotes on the theme (subscribe to get notified when they’re published), various breakout sessions, and innumerable conversations.

We took the opportunity to poll our attendees on their experiences, challenges, and plans for their future workplaces and work environments.

The results were exciting and not quite what we expected. In this post we’re publishing the full results as well as our own analysis and take on them.

As Hubspot celebrates its 15th birthday, (9 June), Dharmesh Shah shared 15 things he has learned along the way one for every year.

Dharmesh has been a frequent speaker at Business of Software over the years. Just as Joel Spolsky’s news last week prompted us to take a look at some of the talks that showed how his thinking has evolved over the years, Dharmesh’s give an insight into how his learning as an entrepreneur has grown as his baby Hubspot has too.

From insights around MIT, through building better businesses, successful businesses, big ass businesses, great businesses, you can see the trajectory of the company and the entrepreneur… This will be a business school case study one day.

Hat tip to Taylor McKnight, Founder of Virtual Events platform Emamo, who in the process of building his new website discovered the most active participant in virtual events in history. Just for fun and as a lesson in why stock photos are not a very good idea for your website…

She gets everywhere! Have you met her yet?

Joel Spolsky, founder of FogCreek, Trello, Stack Overflow, HASH – and, with Neil Davidson, one of the original movers behind a thing called Business of Software Conference, announced that Stack Overflow has been acquired by Prosus, a European private equity firm that is the largest shareholder in Tencent, for $1.8 billion.

Congratulations to the team for another notable exit. Don’t forget, Trello was a FogCreek production that was purchased by Atlassian – you can hear the story behind how they almost messed up Trello here…

Most BoS supporters tend to be relatively large companies. Where by “relatively large” we mean more than two people.

Not so for Software Promotions. One of the things that sets them apart, and proudly so, is that they’re only two people — and they have no plans on ever changing that.

They believe this what has kept many of their clients with them for years.

What do they do? Well, they promote software. Check out Dave’s talk from 2016 to learn why and how they do this differently and come join them at BoS Conf Online Spring on the 26th and 27th of April.

Jason VandeBoom will be speaking at BoS Conf Spring.Online 26-27 April on the topic: Inflection Points on a Journey from Side Hustle to 1,000 People.

Jason is the founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign. He went against a lot of traditional advice for startups: staying in your lane; not going after big companies as your first customers; treating customer support as a cost centre…

Those unorthodox decisions have been key to the growth of ActiveCampaign.