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Hi Zenith Catcher, This week, I had quite a bunch of meetings and events. Let me give you a walkthrough. On Monday, I traveled to the University of St. Gallen to meet my supervisor for the master’s thesis I’m currently writing. The topic I chose for the thesis is customer discovery interviews in B2B software (or Software as a Service) to find a business problem worth solving. Put simply, how do I find a business problem that enough people share and are willing to pay for a software solution? Since I conducted many customer discovery interviews over the last business projects I started, I think this is quite an interesting topic to talk about in a thesis. The goal will be to devise a framework that operationalizes the interview process to know when you have found a problem that is big enough to make out of it a business to solve it. The framework will be based on theoretical insights (literature review) and practical aspects (real-world interviews I’ve conducted). The meeting with my supervisor was quite productive. I prepared myself properly with a meeting agenda. Bought him a coffee beforehand to make him feel valued. And got some helpful inputs on how to improve my thesis disposition. One thing I’m optimizing for is to attain the best possible grade (in Switzerland a 6). In my last exam semester, I achieved three times grades 6, so I learned how to do this. Actually it’s quite simple (not easy). The rule: Everything you can optimize, you optimize. Let me explain. I had a course called Family Business. How did I get a grade of 6? I attended every lecture. I raised my hand to give input and to show I’ve read the readings for the lectures. I scheduled a Q&A/feedback session with the assistant. I asked questions after the lecture. The individual assignment we needed to submit was more than they expected (it was a large poster). We practiced properly for the group work presentation. When submitting the individual and group work, I not only submitted it through the official channel but also sent the assistant a personal email with a Google Drive folder. Long story short, you see that I optimized many different areas. Many 1% efforts that accumulated led to a grade of 6. It’s not magic. It’s just time and effort. The cool thing is you don’t need to be that smart; you just need to put in the work. The same approach I’m now trying to deploy while writing my master’s thesis. New Job Apart from this, I got a new job at a Swiss B2B SaaS startup. After trying to build my own startup for the past 9 months, I decided, together with my team, to pause this project due to a challenging target group (Private Equity) and some other reasons that I will not discuss here. Overall, it was a great learning experience, of which I’m grateful. All this to say, I have decided now to work for a company to learn more before starting my next company. “In your twenties, you want to learn, not earn.
Scrappy startup > top-notch investment bank.”
So, I got a job as an SDR (Sales Development Representative). Fancy words for a dude who makes prospects interested in the stuff the business sells (software). Since one of my goals is to become a B2B SaaS sales master, I believe this job is a great way how to learn the basics from generating leads as an SDR to, at a later point, closing actual deals as an Account Executive. I think this startup is a good fit for my goals and personality. I also spent 2 weeks with one of the co-founders of this startup in the Dominican Republic and saw firsthand that he is very driven and a “hustler.” So pretty excited. I will start on June 2nd this year. I’m very much looking forward to it. What is quite cool is that they invited me to their team retreat in Valencia, which will happen next week. Flights are already booked and I will join them from Wednesday till Sunday—quite a nice pre-start experience. Hosting an Event Furthermore, this Thursday, I hosted my second large Swisspreneur event (Founders Dinner in St. Gallen). If you don’t know Swisspreneur, we’re a non-profit organization on a mission to promote and advance entrepreneurship in Switzerland. Our team does this as a volunteering activity because of our passion for entrepreneurship, wanting to give back to the community, and other motivators. Usually, I work in the syndicate, where we do early-stage startup investments (I manage our investor community of 900+ people). However, since a colleague of mine couldn’t host this planned event, I saw it as a great opportunity to learn and help out the events team at Swisspreneur. The event was great fun. About 40 people attended, all founders of scalable companies and venture capitalists—a well-curated group of people. I really enjoyed being the host. Hosting people and ensuring they have everything they need is such a rewarding feeling. I felt similar when Silvan (my mentor), another organization, and I organized a large investor event with 130+ participants. Making people feel valued and assuring they’re having a good time is very rewarding. One thing I want to improve for another time is when talking in front of a large crowd, as I needed to do at this event when giving the intro speech. I want to eat something small before. I was a bit nervous when standing in front of all the attendees, although I practiced the text I wanted to say many times. I just think I should have drank more still water before and eaten something small to have something in my stomach since I ate the last time around noon (the event was in the evening). Interestingly, when I ate, I was not that nervous at past events. Conversely, when I fast, there is more variation. Sometimes, I’m not nervous at all, and sometimes, I have shaky legs when talking in front of many people. So overall, it was a great experience. Participants were pretty happy. The Net Promoter Score (a metric for measuring satisfaction) was quite good, around 100 right now, which is considered word class. Important here, this is not just the result of my work as a host. My colleagues on the event team had to do the heavy lifting of preparing for the event, sending emails, etc. So that the event could work smoothly, they put in the vast majority of the work. I was just there hosting in the end. Strategy Session When talking about Swisspreneur, I also had a quarterly Strategy Session with my syndicate teammates. In the session, we brainstormed about our investment thesis, which will help us navigate which startups to push in the future as investment cases to our investor community. We also talked about the core structure of the startup relations branch (what is our primary value add as Swisspreneur to our portfolio companies) and the investor relations branch (how do we want to continue making our investor base happy). It was a great session. I like my teammates. It’s always good fun talking to them. Podcasts Over the past few weeks and months, I mostly listened to music during my gym sessions instead of podcasts. However, this week, I found myself returning to podcasts (though I still regularly listened to them outside of the gym). After finishing work, I often felt too mentally drained to dive into deep podcast conversations, thinking it would require too much focus and energy due to all the insights. But that’s just a mental illusion. Once I actually start a podcast and get about five minutes in, I notice it’s much easier to concentrate, and it’s far less dopamine-stimulating than music. Music can be a strong, artificial dopamine booster—though I still enjoy it occasionally. By limiting how often I listen to music, I make sure it feels special again whenever I turn it on. Here are some of the conversations I listened to:
By the way, I have a list of my 100+ favorite podcast episodes of all time. Answer to this email and I will see if I can share it with you. So it was a great week. I will leave you with this question I came across in Rogan’s episode together with podcaster, Chris Williamson: “You’re stuck in a third-world prison, and you get one phone call to ring somebody to get you out. Who would you ring?” (—> Great way to identify who the highest agency person is in your life.)
Have a great start to the week. Nicola PS: I do a podcast where I pretend to have a Swiss accent (wink). 190+ episodes online about high performance and business. You can subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. This week on the Catch The Zenith Podcast: 195: Why Everyone Should Blog Every Day. Listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or my Website. Inspiring Things This Week:Podcast: One of my favorite podcast episodes of all time. I’ve listened to it many, many times: Naval Ravikant – Joe Rogan Podcast Eating Hack: To enjoy food more, chew your food slowly and properly. Eat unhurriedly and consciously. No phone. Do distractions. This was, for me, a much different experience as opposed to downing food in a matter of minutes. More about this in “Serve to Win” by by Novak Djokovic. Quote of the Week:“People that have elite talent want to work for people with elite character”
– Leila Hormozi, CEO of Acquisiton.com Video Recommendations: |
