Amos Schwartzfarb, Managing Director of the Techstars Austin Accelerator knows how to help startups sell. In fact, he wrote the book on it - literally. Author of, “Sell More Faster - The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups,” from the Techstars Press, Amos got his start in startups helping turn an old school mail-order company into one of the first e-commerce companies. After time with 6 other startups, he moved to the investor side when he joined Techstars in 2015. In November, 2019, Amos presented an abbreviated version of his “W3” (Who - What - Why) presentation to students at LaunchPad Propel in New York City.
Amos’s “W3” framework helps entrepreneurs figure out if they can achieve product-market fit, and provides a roadmap for startups to get there. It also helps founders identify what of their beliefs still need to be proven - with data. His presentation is meant to be an interactive exercise utilized by multiple startup teams at once and collaboratively addresses three primary questions:
- Who their customer is
- What their customer is buying
- Why their customer buys their product (both business “why” and motivation “why”)
Within each of these areas, both in this presentation and in his book, Amos provides additional questions to dig deeper. In the recording Amos also shares a number of lessons based on hundreds of 3W conversations with the startups that he has mentored and coached in the Austin accelerator. Three of these lessons are:
- Presenting the answer to these three questions as rapidly and clearly as possible is critical - investors and customers lose interest in a short amount of time.
- Answering these questions as narrowly and specifically as you can is also immensely important - it is too easy for when founders who are desperate for traction to try and be everything to everyone.
- Being able to prove the answer to all three of these questions requires a significant amount of data - entrepreneurs often need to recognize a need to do more customer discovery.
Following the 3W exercise, Amos explains what next steps student entrepreneurs (and entire teams) should take. He also shares the biggest mistake he sees startups making - and knowing that will help your students avoid this common error!
Check out our recording of Amos's Sell More Faster presentation from Propel 2019:
Further campus leader reading: Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups (Techstars).
