Being an entrepreneur: Now and Before.

This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Turkey.

Sam Mallikarjunan is currently a university professor at Harvard University. He also worked with HubSpot. He helps people learn how to speak, especially entrepreneurs so that they know how to convince their clients. Also, helps with consulting, and teaching.

Mr. Sam Mallikarjonan used to work with HubSpot Labs and is the author of the book How To Sell Better Than Amazon. During Startup Turkey 2016, he shared with our audience how HubSpot worked within their own company to test new startups and new ideas, as well as new technologies. 

Mr. Mallikarjunan started his speech by talking about smartphones, everyone in the audience turns out that he or she owns a smartphone. He described how splendid it is to have access to the entire human race’s history and achievements through that small device we keep in our pockets. It also makes life interested for him as a speaker, since while delivering a speech, he has to compete with every piece of content that has been made by anyone, at any given time. That took Mr. Mallikarjunan to his next point, where when people go out to the world, that is what they are actually doing; competing with people across the planet when it comes to the marketing and growth campaigns. Entrepreneurs will have to compete with everybody and everything that they have ever created in order to be successful in their own way by giving something entirely new. 

It has not always been this way, it is not the entrepreneurs who changed, but the customers are the one who did. New technologies go through these adoptions through time, today almost everyone has a smartphone. Which portrays the cycle that a company or a new product goes through. At first, no one knows it or uses it, then people start knowing it, that is why it begins to attract audience and clients, then goes through those stages of early adopters, late majority and all of that, until it reaches the point of being known by everyone.  

Disruptive innovation used to be a thing that happened over the course of decades and centuries. But now, disruption and product adoptions are things that happen over the course of years rather than centuries, sometimes even months. Nowadays, you could really quickly scale up the adoption and make a big change in the universe. 

What HubSpot did is exploring new ideas and technologies, and actually getting to know how to kill their own company before customers do. The first framework that Mr. Mallikarjunan uses stands for ‘Fake it, iterate, retain, scale-up, and test.’ He believes that when you do something, you need to do it in the best way possible before you could move on, and that one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs today, is establishing a company, building it in the right way and keeping it focused on one central goal before moving on to something new. 

According to the First Framework of Mr. Mallikarjunan, before you launch a startup, you need to define people’s assumptions. You also need to focus on the ‘jobs-to-be-done framework’; it deals with what is the customer hiring you to do as a business, which gives you a basic users’ assumption that you can test throughout your process. 

https://vimeo.com/157717675