Optimism vs. Realism with Ning Zhang

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Hi, this is Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster. Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Today, my guest is Ning Zhang. Ning is the CEO of Flatfee, and she is a longtime international M& A lawyer. Ning, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Ning Zhang: Thank you for having me, Matt. It's a great pleasure to be here to talk to everybody. Flatfee Corp, we are a compliance, kind of a one- stop shop, it's a marketplace. What we are trying to do is to help small and mid- size companies when they expand globally, we want to be the compliance one- stop shop where they don't need foreign attorneys, accountants, tax people. We have everything, so that's the idea.

Matt Blumberg: I love that. We could have used that at my last company where we could every... Each market, we did one by one by one by one.

Ning Zhang: That's painful.

Matt Blumberg: I totally understand what you're doing. What is your question? How can I help you today?

Ning Zhang: Yes. As a startup founder, I'm pretty sure many listeners share my anxiety on a daily basis. It's such a great idea, how come nobody ever thought about that? Then you start doing that. You feel so optimistic. You feel everything works out. There's then a doubt like, " How come other people didn't work out? There is a competitor. Why am I better than them?" People give you all those feedback, good, constructive, and you start to doubt maybe there's a reason it doesn't work, why? The world hasn't changed, maybe something wrong inherently. How do you overcome that? How do I know that if I'm being optimistic or I'm just being realistic?

Matt Blumberg: Right. It's a great question because as entrepreneurs, we're all programmed to be optimistic, to drive our vision, and to have that mentality of I never want to take no for an answer. But the problem is sometimes the answer actually is no. I've always found a few pieces to this answer. The first one, the obvious one is you have to listen, listen, listen. But you have to balance out how much you listen with how much you lead when you're having conversations with customers and potential customers because you do want to listen. You want to listen to their pain points. You want to listen to the reaction to your solution. But frequently customers aren't going to be creative enough themselves to come up with the next new idea. It's getting that balance right of listening and leading. I think that's not as important as the second thing though, which is I would just say is follow the money. If you have customers that are spending money with you, even if they're spending money on small, introductory services, or on things that bridge between a freemium service and a fully paid solution. Watching where people spend, particularly in this environment is really telling. Then I actually think that you have to be around long enough, watching how people renew paid services is incredibly important. Because even if they're interested enough to try something, when that renewal comes up, whether the renewal is 12 months out or six months or three months, or even one month, sustained payment tells you a lot more than just listening. But I think the most important thing that I've learned about this is selecting who you listen to and who you watch the payment trends around. We built a product at Return Path, my last company many years in, so we were already a big company, but we were launching a new product and we thought we were following the book. We were just doing the Lean Canvas, we were doing the discovery, the validation, people were paying, and we thought we had a great solution. Then we realized that we had built a great solution for way too small a segment of the market. Even though we had something that was following the book, the TAM, by the time we got to the end of it, had been whittled down so much that it wasn't really a commercially interesting product anymore. You want to watch where people spend, how they spend and how they renew, but you have to be really careful to look at a cohort that's broad enough that you know you're getting comprehensive enough data on your TAM. In your case, it's probably looking at different industries, different verticals, different sizes of company, maybe different profiles of how global the business is. I'm not quite sure what all the test cells are, but you want to make sure that you're learning from enough test cells with enough depth that you get to the end of it and feel like, oh, this really is grounded in a large TAM.

Ning Zhang: That's very, very helpful. Thank you so much, Matt. Yeah, I do feel what you said is very valid because when we talk to the clients, they have different perspective. They always have all those wishes, and it's hard for a startup to really cater to everybody's wishes. Sometimes you feel really down, not knowing whether you are going to the right direction, but it's totally right that I have to find a commonality among a large enough group of people and see if we're addressing their problems. That definitely helps. It's a great insight. Thank you.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Well thanks for joining me on The Daily Bolster, Ning. I appreciate it. It's good to see you.

Ning Zhang: Nice seeing you.