Insight
Lobo: Bootstrappers should sell manual services before building automated software
“If you want to bootstrap a company and you have no, no, no money whatsoever. Right, and to build a product. Go and get 10 customers to pay you for a service that you deliver behind the scenes Wizard of Oz manually. Customers want an outcome anyway. They don't …”
Insight
Lobo: Sales is the most important skill for startup founders
“The most important skill for a founder to have is learning to sell, because you're selling, first you're selling to your family that this thing is worth it. You're selling to co-founders, you're selling to customers, You're selling employees to join you for al…”
Insight
Lobo: A true community requires peer-to-peer interaction without the influencer
“Audience is different than a community. Insta influencers, they're all audiences. People have newsletters, they're audiences. That's great. The community is where members or people the audience interacts with one another without the sort of influence, key infl…”
Insight
Lobo: In-person multisensory events build stronger connections than digital formats
“Anytime we incorporate more than two senses into an equation, you start to build even stronger connections. Like when you're doing meetups, you're drinking together, you're smelling each other's sweat, you're shaking hands and you start building more and more …”
Insight
Lobo: Early-stage startups must start a community of practice, not product
“Now, if you don't have product market fit or not very many users, you're just early on, you can't start a community of product, right? People will think that you're going to sell to them, right? I mean, it's obvious. Why would I go to a community of product wh…”
Insight
Lobo: Building a community prevents a product from becoming a commodity
“Yesterday's innovation always becomes today's option and tomorrow's commodity. You look at the GPS, right? Perfect example. You couldn't get it. Then it was an option in the car. Now everyone has Apple CarPlay. If you build a community, you won't become a comm…”
Insight
Lobo: Executive value misalignment creates severe friction once startups generate revenue
“As soon as you start making money, if founders or execs are not aligned on the same values, like maybe one person is not transparent, but the other person believes in supreme transparency, it never works out.”
Insight
Lobo: Scaling startups fail by over-resourcing new markets without re-validating ICPs first
“They immediately go and put all the same amount of resources that they have in scale in one market in another market versus going through that same model again. Let's go and validate the ICP in that market. See if the same message resonates when you need to tw…”
Insight
Lobo: Hiring for tenure over trajectory turns startups into corporate incumbents
“If you keep hiring and promoting people based on tenure versus trajectory, you will become the very thing you set out to disrupt. And that means like people with high trajectory question a lot
they tend to use their hands a lot, and I think you can stretch th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lobo: Boast.ai bootstrapped to near eight figures before raising outside capital
“We of course did boast bootstrapped it to near eight figures before raising money.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lobo: Bi-weekly webinars drove 60,000 subscribers and 2M YouTube views
“I never thought like these webinars that we do to a two X a week would contribute so much to adding like 60,000 subscribers in two years, but it did because we're doing two X a week at every time there's hundreds and hundreds more people coming. And then it dr…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lobo: Traction founder community has about 110,000 subscribers
“Tractions, the community for founders, et It's got about a 110,000 subscribers.”
