Dani Grant
speaker
74 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard Jul 2024
Dani Grant’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Startup Ideas Podcast · Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas · 24 Jul 2024
podcast
Moats are dead and brand is the only moat. You know, Peter Thiel says like the best way to compete is to not compete. And I think that brand is the best way you can do that. Where if you occupy enough mental space for a category, no one is searching for an alternative. Like basically the strategy for startups right now is to be Coca-Cola. It's like, why do you drink Coca-Cola?
Not because of any like, like lock-in or anything. It's because it's Coca-Cola. I think that brand is the best moat out there this year.
So my co-founder and I met when we were product managers at Cloudflare and we loved working together so much so that After I left Cloudflare, we did like a hackathon weekend trip to Colorado. We got like a cabin in the woods and we like hacked on startup ideas. And we just knew we were going to start something together. We just didn't know what.
And so what does any enterprising, you know, mid-20s person do when they know they're going to start something is they create a notion of ideas. And we filled it with all sorts of ideas we had over the course of like a couple weeks. And there are now 141 ideas in this notion. And we got super lucky because here's what happened.
We had like a call scheduled to go through our notion and pick what startup to start. And before we could even open this doc, we just started gossiping about our old team and talking about this crazy like PM engineer process. that was happening right now in the team. It was like, it was early COVID.
No one was set up for remote and engineers were like asked to be like updating like spreadsheets and JIRAs. It was insanity. And we're like, wait, should we just solve a problem that we have faced ourselves instead of any of these ideas?
And I've got to tell you, I am so happy we did because the thing that I did not appreciate on day one of being a founder is that if this goes to plan, this is actually probably the next 10, 15 years of your life.
And so to work on something that I love the user of because I've been that person and that like I resonate with the problem, like I feel like we dodged a bullet, but now we've got a lot of ideas to share with the people listening to you.
Okay, idea one. K-pop style factories for... Particular talent. When you're building a startup, there are certain unicorn hires you just have to make. But every single startup has to make the same unicorn hires. Like here's an example. When a startup hires their first growth marketer, that's a specialized hire. It is a hard hire to find.
Like our first marketer, we spent eight months searching, like really searching. But that's a set of skills and you can teach it. And so you could imagine a world in which there's a K-pop style factory where they are churning out the first growth marketer for startups.
And people will pay a lot and they'll pay to not have to spend any much searching and to have the person start the next day when honestly they needed someone yesterday and didn't start hiring soon enough.
I'm here to tell you that I love bootcamps. I think coding bootcamps have changed so many people's lives. I think they are one of the best things that's happened in education in the last 10 years. But this flips it on its head. The code bootcamp route is... Take people, make them junior developers at a generalized big company. This is the opposite of that.
It's take people, make them extremely senior, very fast, extremely specialized for a high paying, like extremely focused type of job. So growth marketer is one. Here's another type of job that you could do this sort of like K-pop factory for. which is a dev evangelist. When a startup needs their first dev evangelist, that person is like a superstar hire.
I mean, they have star power, they're building, they're great at speaking. That person is so hard to find. And the only people out there that you can see doing it are the ones who are already doing it. And you don't just need someone who can do it, you need someone who's going to be the first. And so instead of me as a founder, any founder out there,
hiring a recruiter, trolling through LinkedIn and Twitter and trying to interview like hundreds of people for this one super specialized role. Why shouldn't there just be like the factory that turns out the best people at this? Low acceptance rate, but they like make them amazing.
Totally. Yes.
Totally. And there's no competition out there because here's what happens today. Like startup founder goes to a recruiter and says, I'm looking for this person. And the recruiter tells them, that's kind of a unicorn. And you're like, yeah, yeah, I know. I'm in the business of hiring unicorns.
And the recruiter says like, okay, but that doesn't really work with my model because my model is I do a bunch of work. And then if I happen to succeed, then you pay me commission. And so they're nervous to do a ton of upfront effort for a search that they don't have a ton of history of doing.
They don't have the network for, will take a ton of calls to like sift through candidates and they may not even find the person. So this is like the opposite of that. It's like you tailor make people for these positions. And the reason why I think this is so impactful for the world is because it makes it easier to start companies and build like impactful businesses.
And like, that's the way a lot of things in the future will advance is like, through companies building new things. But the other reason is there are a lot of people out there who need to change their life and want to change their life, but they're just not going to become junior developers because their set of skills is different. Like the thing that they can contribute to the world is different.
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