The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. So one of Potscan's main customer profiles that I've recognized over the last couple of years building this business is marketers, people who think in marketing terms with marketing jobs or marketing goals. And in a way, even my other customer profiles, the founders, the builders, the public relations experts, the researchers, all of them have a similar process to how they use the data that Podscan provides, whether it's through the alerting system that we have or the deep full text search capabilities that we have into millions of podcast transcriptions. Everybody has certain interests, a couple of things that they really want to get out of this data.

And the more I run the business, the more I realize that there's this kind of hierarchy, a Maslovsky hierarchy of needs that marketers have in terms of how they look at data. So that's what we're going to be looking at today. A quick word from our sponsor, paddle.com. I use Paddle as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They take care of all taxes, the currencies, the tracking of declined transactions, and then updating credit cards when the numbers change and all that so I can focus on dealing with my customers, my competitors, and not with banks and financial regulators.

If you think you would rather just build your product, well then go and check out paddle.com as your payment provider and merchant of record. Now in a recent conversation with my brother-in-law who runs his own branding agency and is a deep expert in brands and markets and audience perceptions, I realized that even without understanding that there is this hierarchy of needs, I've actively used it in my product onboarding process. And I think I've shared this a couple times over the last ten ish or so episodes that I have this kind of AI assisted process that helps people set up alerts and all that, but I haven't really shared how I thought about which alerts to set up. But I probably made the right choices here, and that has caused several pretty sticky customers to stay on the platform. So let me share how this came about and what it's all about.

I think it's probably very interesting to look at the data that people you serve actually need, like people who have a job to be done and what they need for that job, and understand what exactly the data is and how important different kinds of data are to them in which specific order. Like I said what I found is kind of this Maslov's hierarchy of needs which if you've never heard of it before is this theory of motivation that describes how humans need to fulfill one kind of need before they can go on to another. Right? They have physiological needs first, actual physical needs like food, water, air, shelter, clothing, that kind of stuff. And once those are satisfied, they move on to safety needs, personal security, ownership, property, health.

And once that's satisfied, it gets more cerebral, becomes about love and belonging, partnership, friendship, connection, and once those things are established meaningfully, people can develop something akin to esteem, self esteem, motivation, respect with each other, and then ultimately when that is present, self actualization, like making a dent in the world. That becomes a possibility. But each of these layers needs to be there before people are able to go on to the next layer. And I think I found something similar to exist for marketers. Of course, not as deep as this human need thing, but anybody who is seeking somebody else's attention has the specific lens through which they look at what they need to make smart choices, what people who are trying to convince others need to get them to use their service, to join their organization, maybe sell them something or get them to pay attention in any way.

And they need to know something and they need to know something in order. So that's kind of where my hierarchy came in. A couple months ago, I decided that we're all using AI in really strange ways on the Internet. So how about just making it useful and start using AI in interesting and user helping ways, like bringing actual customer needs forward and make AI functionally fulfill these instead of just making AI do jobs that nobody needs them to do. So I tried to figure out how I could use AI in my onboarding process.

And what I found was that people often struggled with creating good initial alerts for their businesses or for the jobs they have because they didn't know what to look for, or at least they didn't know how to phrase it. And since I've had a lot of customers and a lot of insights into what they ultimately ended up searching for and what was effective as alerts, I built this list of 10 things that I believe people should look into in a certain order. I built an AI system, an agentic system around it that asks people a couple of questions and then builds those 10 alerts perfectly for that particular user. If it's a medical company it asks them what branch of medicine they're in and what they're trying to accomplish in the podcasting space, what they do, what they do best, what they're known for, what maybe they're not known for, and then it starts tracking all kinds of different things about them. And if they're a different company, obviously, the questions would be different, but the outcome would be the same.

We would set up these different things, and I built this so that people would have a very broad overall net to fish in the podcast conversation space with. And here are the things in order of relevance that I came up with. The biggest one is a mention of the service or the product that these people work for. Somebody who works for Notion will look for mentions of Notion, the product, or Notion AI, a product of the Notion company. Somebody who works for a soccer club or a football club will look for the names of their players, the name of the club, maybe their mascots, the kind of track where people mention those things.

It's very specific, but it's always been the very first thing that people want. It's about who we are. It's some kind of identity thing. The thing that they care about most, the thing that they're paid by, the thing that they need to market, the thing that they need to facilitate is their own organization. So the first thing that people always search for is the name of their product, the name of their business, or even their own name.

And that happens quite a lot as well because people wanna know where they are mentioned so they can react to it. So the first level is self awareness. What are people saying about me or my thing, my product, my business? The second biggest thing is always reliably after this. What are my competitors doing?

Like, people don't really care about anything else but their immediate competitors. It's the moment you know when you're mentioned, you become increasingly interested in people around you. The people who compete with, the people who are in the same market, what are their interests, what are they talking about, what are the conversations that they're participating in, where are they mentioned, what are they not just saying, but what is said about them. This reliably is the biggest thing that I find being tracked on the platform. There's nuance here, obviously, because it's kind of a self selection.

People often only know a few of their actual competitors by name. There's always this unknown unknown in there as well. Sometimes you just don't know who's building the business that's coming to replace you, and sometimes you're just not aware of the competitors that are up and coming. But in a sense, that doesn't really matter. I've seen people track not just competitors, but emergent trends in the industry.

I'll get to that. So they can spot new names along the way, but the biggest second thing after their own brand is always, what are my direct competitors doing? It's competitive awareness. That's the second level. And it goes from what are people saying about me to what are people saying about my competitors to the next layer.

And that is what are people saying about developments in the industry? What am I missing out on by having this almost myopic lens just on myself and the immediate threats around me? It becomes a widening of the conversational landscape that people become interested in once these two basic needs are dealt with. What is it that I am gonna eat today? What am I about?

Is somebody going to steal my food? That's the competitors. And once that's dealt with, people are asking, well, what food is out there? What are new places to hunt? What are new places to harvest?

That's kind of the development, the metaphor that I see. People care about themselves, their immediate surroundings, and then they look further out towards the horizon. And it's also at that point that things shift. Very quickly with that comes what I would call the sentiment based interests. People very quickly turn their attention not just to the factual conversations in the field around them once they have that covered, but also to the emotional sentiment around it, the feelings that people have.

I've seen very positive sentiments around people who really solve other people's problems in a delightful way. People get great shout outs. Their products get mentioned and highlighted and reviewed positively, and people track that. Right? Because they wanna see, well, what's happening in the world of feelings around my product?

And then I've seen social media tracking for airlines or Internet providers or other companies that tend to get a lot of flak because of the intensity with which a problem, when it happens, affects people's lives. A SaaS business, if that's down for five minutes, well, that's not a problem. An airplane that doesn't go where you need to go because you have something important to attend, now that is a problem. So clearly, things have a different impact on people's lives, and the shout outs or the criticism is particularly loud around this. It's been quite interesting to see the tracking that happens both around the shout outs, the customer success stories, the very positive signals, and the reputation management, which is kind of what a lot of PR companies do as a job.

The whole point of them existing is to track public relationship disasters and answer them before they get picked up by news media or something, get a spin on the conversation, get the narrative adjusted. So you will find a lot of people out there looking for sentiment. They look for other people's opinions, the opinion landscape. It goes from fact to opinion. First me, then my threats, then the larger landscape, and then how do people feel.

And beyond that, that's the fifth, the last level that I've realized there, is strategic projection. What comes next? Because once the sentiment landscape is covered, people look into signals in the market, but not just about consumer behavior, not about what do people want to buy, but about things like investor behavior or regulator behavior. I see a lot of people that use Podscan for tracking acquisition and investment signals. Who gets acquired by whom in my industry?

What's the big move that my future competitor might make right now? They're really small, but they're gonna get acquired. Or they acquire somebody else, right? Are they being acquired by somebody that I should know of? Do they look for investments, new companies springing up and around them?

And at the same time, people look a lot into regulatory and compliance signals. Is a government or some government podcast somewhere debating how they could potentially curtail our capacity to function in the way we do? Are they gonna make things harder for us? Are they gonna make things easier for us? Or is some podcast that is effectively just a livestream of a committee meeting giving me insight right now into something that I should tackle and very quickly solve.

Is there data on this? Because all of this can be tracked. The information is out there. And people do track it. After everything else is set up, they look into these further out projection signals and they track market expansion too.

I think that's in the same line of projecting or guessing future outcomes I guess. Where is the market going? What are the forces? Not just in a sense of what's currently happening in my industry or what's the technological trend, but what happens between industries? Are there movements that I should be aware of?

Is there a kind of seismic shift happening here? Do customer expectations change? Is the chasm moving around? Like, is this becoming mainstream, or is something expected to happen in the future here? How can we get ahead of it?

That's why people track this. How can we be there before this happens? So a lot of that is projection tracking, but it's understanding dynamics that's really the point of this. So if I were to give this a little bit more structure, from a marketer's perspective, if they look at information that can be gleaned from public opinion and public reaction, public notions, values, perspectives on products or services, they always look at themselves first. Are they mentioned?

Where are they mentioned? Just to know what's happening around them. Then they look at what's happening with others directly around them. What are my direct competitors doing? Then they broaden this to the industry just to see what's the wider angle, what's coming a couple miles ahead of me instead of just immediately around me.

And then they go from factual developments into emotional states of people. What are they talking about, what are they celebrating, what are they complaining about. From that, they go into this purely speculative world of thought leadership, investment, acquisition, or regulatory compliance, and the industry at large. It's a hierarchy of market proximity. You think about yourself first and then your immediate threats around you and once the facts are dealt with you look into feelings and how that will impact the future and how that future is seen by others.

And I think this is a very interesting hypothesis because it helps you speak to your customers. Because depending on where they are on their journey in their business, you might need to address different needs differently. If they're currently doing pretty well as a company, they're enterprise, highly monetized, highly profitable, while they probably don't care as much about what's said about them or their immediate threats, it's quite likely that the more important stuff exists in the sentiment of the industry and identifying thought leaders who might they need to hire in the future, who might they need to look out for, who could be discussed for board positions that they might be offering, who might be able to integrate into another company that's what big enterprise business would look at And that's what people who are looking at these opportunities might resonate with in your marketing and outreach materials. Now, if you're a solopreneur business, somebody who's running their own business, they are much more likely completely overwhelmed to begin with, trying to do everything. I certainly do this all the time.

Try to market, try to sell, try to build, try to do everything. So for people like me, you would need to fulfill this hierarchy of needs right from the bottom. You would have to facilitate tracking what's going on with them or what's going on with their direct competitors. Maybe help them discover who these competitors even are and give them access to maybe at most what the industry is doing so they don't get overwhelmed with all the signals from it. It's kinda a positioning thing, positioning for your marketing on what points you speak about, where those people using your product might be.

The way we reach out to our prospects when we're doing sales is very much informed by this. So I'm not sure if something like this exists, like the concept of this hierarchy I just introduced as an actual hierarchy of needs in the marketing literature, but I found it just very interesting in how I communicate with my prospects and what my paying users might need to hear from me to get what they need. What is the next thing they can use my product for? Well, it depends. Where are they?

So when they ask me to help them set up these functional alerts, more often than not, I find it works well to get a glimpse of where they currently are in this particular journey, which needs are already met, and what the next unmet need is that I can focus my attention on. This helps me share with them what they could be doing and what they should be doing in the short term, what their strategy for the long term should be. So think about your own customers, your prospective customers, and the data that they might need from you and the data that they might generally need at the point that they're at. What's their hierarchy of needs? Where are they?

What do they need to know first before they can care about the next level? And understanding this progression isn't just about better onboarding or sales. I think it's about truly understand the journey that your customers are on and meeting them exactly where they are. Because just like Maslov's hierarchy, you can't skip levels. Right?

You can't ask somebody to care about industry thought leadership when they don't even know if people are talking about their product. You can't get them excited about sentiment analysis when they haven't figured out who their competitors are. So build your product, your onboarding, and your sales process with this in mind. Start at the bottom of the hierarchy and work your way up. Your customers will really thank you for it, and probably more importantly, they'll stick around because you're giving them exactly what they need, exactly when they need it.

They're feeling understood. And that's what I've learned building Podscan and the many processes behind it. I just hope it helps you build something meaningful for yourself as well. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrap Founder.

You can find me on Twitter avidkahl, a r v I d k a h l. And if you're interested in the critical conversations about your brand, well, Podscan. F m monitors over 4,000,000 podcasts in real time. They will alert you when influencers, customers, competitors mention you, like, turn your unstructured podcast chatter into competitive intelligence. That is what Podscan is here for.

And if you're a founder that is searching for your next venture, discover validated problems straight from the market, you can go to ideas.podscanfm, and you will find identified startup opportunities from hundreds of hours of expert discussions daily, so we can build what people are already asking for. Share this with anyone who you think needs to turn conversations into competitive advantage. Really appreciate that. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.