⚙️ The Ops Playbook #17

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Good Morning Operators ⚙️

We’ve hit over 6,000 subscribers in two months! I can’t believe the traction that we’ve gotten so far. I’m truly thankful for all of you.

It's clear to me that this newsletter solves a major pain point for you. Well, I want to keep solving a ton more problems for you. I’ve talked to many of you over the past weeks about what a revamped paid subscription looks like.

A few fantastic ideas I’ve heard are:

1. Documents of lessons from 400 of the best operators in the world

2. AI tools to help you work faster. Think generators, quizzes, and more

3. Writing a long form Saturday edition of in-depth how-to guides on scaling different processes

4. Creating an exclusive community of operators. Could be anonymous like Reddit or could it be more focused only on executives like Hampton

5. A game where you play as a startup operator making their company successful

What do you think?

Would you want any of these?

I’m down to build all of these if there is enough interest.

Feel free to reply with one of these ideas (or with your own!). I'm pumped to hear back from you.

While we revamp our paid offering, here are three tips to improve your startup product offerings:

• Finding opportunities in 10Ks

• Ranking customer problems

• Charging your customers

• How to write precise emails (Premium members only)

Let’s jump in…

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1. Analyzing 10K’s to find opportunities

Insight from Mostly Metrics

No, I'm not referencing a long-distance run.

A 10K report is filed annually by a publicly traded company about its financial performance, key risks, and the executives working there.

Imagine you got access to what kept an executive up at night.

10K's have that juicy information you won't find anywhere else.

Don't believe me?

Check out what CJ Gustafson said after analyzing thousands of 10K's:

If you can identify a public company's risk factor, you've discovered an underlying opportunity to build upon.

Follow this SEC link to start coming up with great ideas.

2. Wasting time on the wrong products

Insight from Opinion X

Are you working on a product that has no traction?

Trust me, we've all been there. No shame in that.

I bet you got to this point when a product manager:

• Came up with a product idea and asked customers if this solved their problem

• Customers said, "Yes this does," so then the PM got buy-in from the executive team

• Product flops. Growth teams get blamed for not doing their job to drive traction

The executive team keeps pushing because "customers say we have the right product”. However, customer wallets are saying the opposite.

What is happening here?

The product solved a problem. But not THE problem.

When you talk about a specific problem, customers will not focus on their other issues. They will hyper-focus on the problem you are bringing up.

To combat this, try Customer Problems Stack Rank (CPSR). This can work for customer facing products, internal tools or processes you are building out.

CPSR will tell you how important your idea is compared to the other problems your target customers experience.

Try this:

1. Write a broad question about the activity or task you are improving.

2. Turn your idea into a problem statement.

3. Create other problem statements that fall under the same activity you are optimizing

4. Send your stacked ranked problem statements to target customers (Use this to find participants)

You’ll notice that your target audience will stack rank your statements. This way, you can figure out where to target your efforts.

3. Charge Your Users

Insight from Yinon Ravid

Don’t be shy about charging your users.

Yinon Ravid of Albert almost ran his company into the ground because he missed the most fundamental rule of a business: charging your user.

I know what you’re thinking.

The product or the growth team's job should be determining the customer pricing.

Your job is to make sure the operations run smoothly.

Wrong.

You need to be heavily involved in any decision involving business model changes.

You’re the one in charge of ensuring all the products integrate efficiently with your processes, the customer experience is fantastic and putting the right people in place to scale your company.

So what did Albert learn? He said that he figured out three principles in building a paid product.

4. How to write a business email with military precision

Insight from HBR

When you send an email, your recipient first sees the subject line, so make sure it’s as straightforward as possible.

What is your email’s purpose?

What do you want your recipient to do? Take a page from military personnel. Their subject lines use keywords in all caps to note the email’s purpose.

For example:

INFO – For informational purposes only
REQUEST – Seeks permission or approval by the recipient
ACTION – The recipient must take some action

These demarcations might seem obvious or needlessly exclamatory, but they make your emails stand out in the recipient’s inbox.

So, if you need to send your direct reports a status update, try using the subject line:

INFO – Status Update.

If you need your manager to approve your vacation request, you could write REQUEST – Vacation. Using these keywords also forces you to think about what you want from someone before contributing to their email clutter.

Tool of the Week

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Operators Library

• Advice on meeting with a big name (link)

• Difference between a Chief of Staff and COO (link)

• What to do during a cash crisis (link)

• How to increase velocity (link)

• Learn financial growth hacks (link)*

P.S. To get featured in this section, share the newsletter 10 times (your referral link is below), and I'll include you in a future issue. 

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Something Fun

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