Find Your P.O.W.E.R. Customers

And Daily Async Slack Standups 🤖

Jake Huber
March 10, 2024

Welcome to the Scale Smarter Newsletter.

Today’s issue at a glance:

Scaling Your Startup → Find Your POWER Customers
Scaling Yourself → Daily Async Slack Standups

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🚀 Scaling Your Startup: Find Your POWER Customers

Not all customers are created equal. Some are meh. Some suck. But what if 100% of your customer base was made up of your #1 best customer?

Imagine you could clone your best customer.

I developed the new “R3 Framework” for Techstars and I’m going to walk you through it so you can find more of your best customers:

Reflect on your best existing customers
Refine an updated POWER customer persona
Retarget this persona by updating your processes

R1: Reflect

First, think about your best customer. Name them and picture them in your head. This should be a real customer—we’ll call this your “P.O.W.E.R. Customer”

P.O.W.E.R. = Positive Outlier With Exceptional Results.

Now what makes them your best customer? Consider what sets them apart from the rest and makes them an “outlier.” What were the “exceptional results” you saw from them?

Your “POWER Customer” is probably:

Sticky, not churning
Paying in full and on time
A super user (high activity)
High LTV and high margins
Making referrals to other customers
Self-sufficient and barely require support

Your “POWER Customer” is probably NOT:

Generating low margins for our business
Churning quickly and at high rates
Behind or delayed in paying us
Always asking for discounts
Creating constant issues
Frustrating

Prompt: Who is your best customer? How would you define this “POWER Customer”?

R2: Refine

Next, we’re going to reverse-engineer your POWER Customer to develop an updated Refined Customer Persona.

Think of that upside down pyramid up top. We want to drill down to the most narrow, specific, nicheist niche definition of your customer persona.

Prompt: How are you refining your persona to match your POWER Customer? What new criteria will you use?

R3: Retarget

Now that we have a hyper-targeted POWER customer persona, we’ll determine what needs to change to start targeting & acquiring more of them.

Step 1: Research Your Refined Persona

First, identify all of your existing customers that match your POWER Customer Persona. Then pull data and interview these customers to learn how to find & attract more of them:

How did they solve this problem before using us?
What messaging/value prop resonates most?
What was the motivation / trigger for them?
What channels did they come through?
How are they using your product?

Step 2: Identify Needed Adjustments

Based on your findings from the data and from customer interviews, consider what you’ll need to update to target your refined persona:

Company website and landing pages
Product messaging and marketing
What’s highlighted in demos
Ad copy and imagery
Product roadmap
And more

Prompt: In the next 90 days, what steps will you take to adjust the way you target your freshly refined persona?

To Recap:

Reflect: Defined your “POWER Customer”
Refine: Create a hyper-targeted Customer Persona
Retarget: Develop a 90-day action plan to test your Refined Persona

💪 Scaling Yourself: Daily Async Slack Standups

I’m not here to explain why daily standups are important (hint: they are, and you should try them). I’m here to show you how to run them asynchronously and scale yourself to get that time back!

The case for async standups

The daily standup comes from scrum methodology and is traditionally used by engineering teams.

But I’ve stolen it from product teams I’ve worked with and applied it to other teams in ops, growth & sales. It’s a great way to create alignment and feedback loops.

The issue with a daily standup is that it interrupts the work day. Even a short, 15 minute standup meeting can take you out of flow. Research shows that after an interruption, it can take up to 25 minutes to resume the task.

By moving this meeting off the calendar and into Slack, you scale yourself (get that time back) and create autonomy on your team.

Your directs can submit their update when they have time vs having to attend another standing meeting.

The 3 questions of a daily standup

We’re going to take the same standard standup questions, and push them to Slack to be answered asynchronously:

What did you do yesterday?
What are you doing today?
What’s blocking you?

Set up a daily standup in a Slack channel

From your desktop, click your workspace name in the top left.
Hover over Tools, then select Workflow Builder.
Click Create Workflow.
Click the Send a scheduled message template in the sidebar, then click Use Template.
Edit the template to set a recurring time and date, customize your message, and select a channel to send the reminder to.
Optional: Add a Form as a step to make it easy and consistent for everyone to complete.
Click Publish.

You can also add a step to automatically send yourself a message when a team member submits their standup update so you don’t have to go searching for it:

And here’s what gets sent to you:

Note: Workflows is a paid Slack feature, but if you’re using the free version, you can copy and post this into a channel of your choice to run a similar standup:

/remind #channel-name “Please post your standup update in thread 🧵 Include: 1) What you did yesterday, 2) What you’re doing today, and 3) What’s blocking you. Thanks, team!” Every weekday at 9am

Any you get Slackbot to do the work for you:

Not as fancy, but it gets the job done and still helps you scale yourself!

🎬 That’s a wrap! TL;DR—Your Actions For The Week:

Scaling Your Startup: Identify your POWER customers and determine your 90-day action plan of changes you need to make based on this refined persona.
Scaling Yourself: Set up your team’s daily asynchronous standup in Slack.

Whenever you're ready, there are more ways I can help you:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more.