StartUp Founders: Becoming Core
Dear Reader,
For every founder building helpful, nice-to-have products that people like and might pay for. Are you essential? Without you, is the pain immediate and undeniable? With you, is the value obvious and compounding? Are you CORE?
CORE decides how easy you are to ignore in a sales cycle and push to the next quarter. CORE determines how quickly you’ll be cut when budgets tighten. It’s that simple.
The shift I am suggesting is from building features to engineering dependencies, from securing customers to creating champions, from surviving to thriving.
It’s not all or nothing. Most solutions start by solving one problem, for one champion, extremely well. But to survive long-term, you must become indispensable. The faster you accelerate your journey to becoming CORE, the safer your business becomes. <<View Workbook>>
HYPER RELATED:
Every startup founder has, is, or will feel it. The gap between all the work you’ve done and the results you’re waiting for. It’s awful. It’s universal. It’s “The Dip.“
LETS GET INTO IT:
CORE = Must-Have + Accretive Value + Deep Dependencies
None of this works without greatness.
The foundation of CORE is a product that does what you say it will, and none of this is a substitute for delivering exceptionally.
- Must-Have: Your product solves a problem your customer cannot ignore. It’s not a “nice-to-have”; it’s essential to their workflow or operation. Without it, something breaks.
- Accretive Value: Your product delivers measurable ROI. It justifies its budget allocation by increasing revenue, reducing costs, or improving efficiency (or meeting a compliance requirement).
- Deep Dependencies: Your product is integrated across your customer’s operations that it’s makes it extremely difficult to replace. Switching costs, multi-threaded usage, and organizational reliance make you sticky.
Even if you’re a must-have and accretive, without deep dependencies, you’re still at risk.
It’s why ecosystem marketplaces are so powerful. You use HubSpot, you want to move to Pipedrive but you have a few integrations via their marketplace delivering automations, workflows, and therefore the cost, time, and disruption outweigh the savings or additional features.
Without the integrations, you’re a must-have + accretive value. With them, you’ve added deep dependencies across the organization. CORE.
SOL Score: Sh*t Outta Luck?
The easiest way to reconcile CORE is to ask how many steps it would take for you to be Sh*t Outta Luck (SOL)?
The SOL lens isn’t just for retention. It’s your sales playbook too. If you’re easy to cut after the sale, you’re just as easy to dismiss during the sales cycle. Designing your product to solve undeniable pain is how you win deals and keep them.
Said simpler. It’s the cold emails that get replied to. They hit because they immediately communicate necessity. They solve a problem that’s impossible to ignore. The closer you are to being indispensable, the more likely you are to win.
- What happens if your internal sponsor leaves tomorrow?
- Who would notice if your solution disappeared?
- How many business processes would break?
- How long would it take to replace you?
- Would anyone fight to keep you?
This isn’t about product-market fit or whether your product is good.
The question is about impact and indispensability. In sales, it helps you articulate why your solution is more than just nice to have. Post-sale, it’s a reminder to deepen dependencies and embed yourself in the customer’s workflows.
Every conversation, every pitch, every integration should move you closer to being CORE. Whether it’s a prospect or a customer, the question is always the same: How catastrophic would it be to remove you? The more catastrophic, the closer you are to winning both the deal and hopefully retention.
The CFO Test….
VCs talk about “hair on the deal” as anything that makes a company less likely to survive scrutiny. Imagine the CFO walking into your customer’s office and saying, “Cut your spend.” Are you on the list? That’s “hair on the deal” – a sign your solution lacks champions, deep dependencies, or irreplaceable value.
If you’re easy to slash, lack internal champions, and your removal wouldn’t cause immediate pain, you’re at risk. Being CORE means people fight to keep you because removing you would break too much.
Becoming Core: Must Have & Accretive Value
Ignore CORE, Just Get In The Door….
You don’t have to start as CORE. Most solutions don’t.
Day 0 – your goal is simple: Get in the door. Solve one problem. Be liked. Get vendor approval, get through security, get paid, have a customer. That’s your entrance. But once you’re in, the mission changes. Every day becomes a relentless push to move from “nice-to-have” to CORE.
Here is how you might think about it:
- Map Dependencies: Identify every process that touches your product. Then go create more! Build workflows and integration points across the organization and into the stack. More than just SSO.
- Increase Pain Awareness: Make sure decision-makers feel the pain you’re solving. Reports, dashboards, and ROI metrics make your impact undeniable. It is your responsibility to prove your solution value.
- Build Moats: Every feature should increase switching costs. Every integration should make you harder to replace because of the increased value you deliver.
- Create Champions: Spread your influence. The more stakeholders who depend on you, the more defenders you’ll have when times get tough.
The Journey to CORE
Becoming CORE isn’t instant. It’s a journey:
Entrance: Solve one problem brilliantly and earn trust.
Expansion: Prove your value across teams and use cases.
Embedding: Integrate into workflows, operations and processes.
CORE: Become mission-critical. Visible to leadership and impossible to replace.
There’s no middle ground. Stay relevent.
As always, if I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
— James