Everything Is Messaging

And also Forrester graphics

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? Good? Yeah? You enjoyed reading VCs sniping at each other on Twitter about whether they caused the Silicon Valley Bank collapse or single-handedly saved the software start-up industry? Me too!

---

Tipo

I wanted to start with a quick correction: Thank you to the several people who pointed out the rather significant typo I made last week. The word “believe” was missing. It’s not important from where. Just know “believe” should’ve been in there somewhere. Also, don’t hesitate to tell me when I make typos. I try to catch those before I send them out. I sometimes fail at that. Sometimes = every week, apparently.

---

Spelled M-I-T

Speaking of which…

I was thinking today how lucky I am that I didn’t go to MIT. I probably only mention here twice monthly that I spent 4 years in Ann Arbor, so maybe you didn’t know that. I don’t know. But the nice thing about going to Michigan is when you screw something up, nobody says, “how’d that guy go to Michigan if he’s such a moron?”

Which is one of the drawbacks of going someplace like, for example, MIT. The good thing about going to MIT is going to MIT. The drawback of going to MIT is that if you use “effect” instead of “affect” in your marketing materials, some doofus from a state school who has a newsletter is going to point it out to everyone:

---

Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom/You symbiotic, patriotic, slam but neck, right? Right.

I’ve written a few times (yeah, probably more than a few times) about Gartner and their ridiculously gobbledy charts.

Not to be outdone, competitor analyst firm Forrester really wants to catch up. I don’t blame them - you don’t want to get left behind in the analyst-confusing-graphics racket.

So they published this “new content engine paradigm.” This newsletter that you’re currently reading is nothing if not a content engine. And I’m always looking for a new paradigm, so I felt like this would be perfect for me.

And I see up top that this new content engine paradigm involves getting the 4 rights right. Right?

So B2B content is dead simple, I tells ya. Ya got yer 4 A’s - dat’s Alignment, Automation, Analytics and Assets. And dose 4 A’s? Dey overlap, see, fellas? And where dey overlap, that’s yer CX. Now, you may be saying, “JB, dat’s obvious. We all knew dat.” Yeah, but dat ain’t all.

You got yer 4 P’s. Dose are different than the 4 P’s of marketing. Or the 4 pees, which is what you have to do when you got 4 kids and yer about to leave da house (#dadjoke). Dees P’s are Planning, Production, Promotion and Performance. They overlap wit the A’s, see. And dose P’s and dose A’s overlap and dat’s how ya get yer CX.

But none a dat ain’t nuttin unless you got yer rights, right? Right. So it’s crystal clear - you got yer Right Audience, yer Right Content, yer Right Place and yer Right Time. You got dose. And dose align DI-RECT-LY with yer P’s, and dose overlap which yer A’s and dose combine to make yer CX.

Please note, that’s exactly how this newsletter gets created.

---

Not to be outdone

Oh wait. What’s that? Gartner doesn’t want to be left out? I’m happy to oblige.

First, though - were you wondering how many dimensions there are to composable business architecture? I bet you were, and I bet you thought it was 2. Or 4. Well, you’d be wrong. It’s 3. It’s always 3.

And it’s absolutely simple to explain these 3 dimensions. Take a look:

For those of you less visually inclined, I got your back:

You have a box that’s made up of Composable Business Architecture, Composable Technologies, and Composable Thinking. (Composable Thinking?). Yes. Composable Thinking.

Then you explode the box, and the top flies off. And it becomes a, uh, a cube. But a different cube. This cube is protected by a shitty porous border wall (like Texas’) that’s called the Ecosystem. It’s holding together the cube of Engagement, Capabilities and Technologies. I won’t get into the specifics of those 3 sides of the cube, but please note that the Everything Customer is in there. (Everything Customer?). Yes, Everything Customer.

All of that is surrounded by the Saturn-double-ringed solar system made up of the inner ring of Discovery and Modularity, and the outer ring of Autonomy and Orchestration.

Then all of that is smothered in a gooey 4-cheese blend and covered in Gobbledy Sauce (tm).

And that’s also how this newsletter gets created.

---

Everything Is Messaging

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, but I realized I was lying to myself. It’ll be short, I promise… (and now I’m lying to you.). I wanted to mention two points.

First, there’s a whole chunk of the SVB story that’s about communication, and how companies position the decisions they make.

And that’s because Everything Is Messaging (tm).

Meta, for example, has been laying people off — they announced another 10,000 people this week. But - and this is shocking because historically he’s done a really terrible job of this - Mark Zuckerberg has actually been incredibly strategic in how he’s spoken about it. He’s talked about 2023 being a “year of efficiency,” which at least puts the layoffs in perspective (Meta’s stock rose 7% on the news of the layoffs). He’s spoken about the lack of efficiency in the organization, and how many layers of management have been built. And how they’re going to have to tear it down. And “This will be tough and there’s no way around that.”

He branded the layoffs.

“Year of efficiency” is brilliant - it’s not layoffs. It’s executing on the plan. And the plan is more efficiency. Who’s going to argue with that?

In any case, they’ve made an effort to put ongoing, difficult news into perspective.

SVB didn’t do that. If you care about this story, you’ve no doubt read about it elsewhere, and I’m not going to re-hash it. But part of the run on the bank was triggered by the lack of context given in the financial announcements the bank released last Wednesday. The details aren’t important here, but I wanted to point out that every piece of communication your company puts out requires careful thought about positioning, messaging and storytelling. It’s not just your homepage. Bad messaging has repercussions (we learned).

Because everything is messaging.

Secondly, I’ve** noticed that there is a lot of finger pointing about what happened here. There’s also been a lot of “woe is me” social media posting from CEOs.

(**And everyone else)

But - and apologies for a short non-messaging detour - this story intersects with something I’ve always been interested in in the business world, which is - What is a CEO’s job?

Oftentimes it seems that the CEO’s job is to, um, be CEO. I’ve talked here about one of the underlying causes of miserable messaging is that many CMOs don’t consider it to be the “fun” part of the job. The “fun” part of the job is shooting commercials and talking to celebrities and coming up with a new logo or whatever.

Being the CEO is the “fun” part of being the CEO. But it’s not the job.

I believe the startup CEO job description has 2 parts. Part 1 is the same for pretty much every company - it’s the only role that is both internally and externally facing. Every other job is either externally facing (finance or sales, for example) or internally facing (engineering, IT ).

The CEO is unique in that they are the person responsible for balancing internal and external stakeholder needs. That’s the job of every CEO - balance those needs.

Early-stage company CEOs have a second job - to make sure they have enough cash to keep the lights on. Arguably, this is even more important than the internal/external thing, as you will have neither of those things if you don’t have cash.

If you’re a software company founder, that is not the “fun” part of the job. If the “fun” part of the job is building product, then you should probably be head of product.

Over the past 7 or 8 years, the “making sure you have cash” has (and I’m very much oversimplifying here) meant visiting Silicon Valley every 18 months to go get wheelbarrows full of cash from venture capitalists. Maybe that’s fun, maybe it’s not, but certainly the party you throw after your wheelbarrow is filled with $70 million was pretty fun. So there was a fun part to that job.

But then the fun part of “make sure you have enough cash” disappeared, and you are left with the miserable part. The “yell at sales to go sell more” part and the “we’re cutting our customer success team in half” part. Those parts are less fun.

Also not fun is working with your CFO to ensure that your cash management is rock-solid and de-risked.

And while that’s also the CFO’s job, it’s really the CEO’s job, because the CEO’s job at early stage companies is to make sure they have enough cash to keep the lights on.

So while I - and everyone else, I’m sure! - feel terrible about the state of things (especially over the weekend when it looked like maybe the poop was really going to hit the fan), it’s a collective failure of early-stage CEOs to really be on top of that part of their job. Because that part of the job isn’t fun.

(Whew, it felt good to get that off my chest.)

---

I’ve had some great conversations after my offer to chat with anyone about messaging, and I’ll offer that again. If you want to talk about your website or positioning or how to make sure your startup manages cash correctly or whatever, here’s my Calendly link.

As always, thanks for reading. And if you want to share Gobbledy with one person, I’ll be quite grateful.