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Blazing New Trails with a Small Team with Claire Lew of Know Your Company

Episode #055

From the very beginning, nothing has been ordinary about Claire Lew's (@cjlew23) company, its business model, or the way she came to lead it. Learn how Know Your Company has generated millions in revenue with a tiny team, how Claire has met with over 500 CEOs and business leaders, and what she's learned about creating a successful company.

Show Notes

  • Know Your Company — software tool that helps business owners get to know their employees better and overcome company growing pains

  • The Watercooler — online community for leaders looking to become better

  • The Heartbeat — bi-weekly newsletter on leadership, company culture, employee engagement and employee feedback by Claire Lew.

  • Knowledge Center — guides and resources for leaders looking to create a positive culture of openness and honesty within their companies.

  • Know Your Company Blog — thoughts on leadership, company culture, employee engagement, and employee feedback

  1. 3

    One of the best interviews I've heard on IH. Congrats @cjlew23!

  2. 2

    Great interview!!

    P.S Honcho is not the Spanish word for boss, it's Japanese :)

  3. 1

    Great interview.

  4. 1

    My Main Takeaways:

    • Claire’s company “Know Your Company” is a 2 person company servicing over 15,000 employees in over 25 different countries.

    • It’s not about doing all the work, it’s about doing the right work. And one way to do that is to have less employees, so that the few people that are there only focus on the most important things.

    • Claire and her co-founder hit over a million a year in revenue in the first 2.5 years of business.

    • Claire works with a handful of contractors.

    • Claire’s product “Know Your Company” started out as a product of another company called BaseCamp

    • After graduating college Claire co-founded a company called The Starter League that teaches people how to code. And Basecamp was one of the minority investors, that’s how she got into contact with Basecamp. But she left this company and took some time off to figure out what she wanted to do.

    • Soon she re-entered the job market and got a job at another company… but she hated it. She felt like her boss didn’t know his company, she felt unheard… and that’s how she got the idea for Know Your Company. So she began doing research on communication in the workplace. And then she quit her job with 10 months savings left, and decided that solving this problem would be her life’s work. She began reading everything and anything on this issue to become an expert.

    • Claire then went back to her company that she started “The Starter League” and pitched her idea, and the CEO (who was her friend), said that she’d pay for that, and asked if claire could provide consulting services relating to “Know Your Company” (which entailed getting and giving feedback from employees). Claire did this, but refused receiving payment because she just wanted to find out if her solution to the problem worked. And it worked. So Claire got into consulting. She then got introduced to Jason Fried, the CEO of BaseCamp.

    • BaseCamp was also building a product to solve the problem that Claire was hired as a contractor to solve, and Claire was asked if she could help out on that too.

    • After working with BaseCamp and helping them with their software and as a consultant, she went and taught herself how to code (She learned rails), and started making her own version of the software. But soon her savings were running out. Then the CEO of BaseCamp reached out to Claire, offering her to be the CEO of a spinout company that runs the software that she helped them build. She was excited.

    • Imposter syndrome: After a year of working on the company, she realised that she was very tired, because she worked constantly, thinking that she had to work hard to prove herself due to her imposter syndrome. She believes that she could have worked less hard, and still got things done.

    • Do live demos of your product to your customer to identify the true pains of the customer.

    • Use the language your customers used when expressing their pains to you, in your marketing copy.

    • SELL to people to determine whether people will pay you for what you’re offering.

    • You’ll get more ideas to work on from the other pains that your customers mention.

    • Claire wasn’t a part of her first company “The Startup League” because she wanted to, she was there because she felt like her friends wanted to be there.

    • Claire fired her business development person because they weren’t making enough sales. The numbers don’t lie. (No malice intended).

    • Claire got her first waves of customers through BaseCamp. After those inbound leads decreased, she started reaching into her network. Then she started doing a LOT of public speaking and through this she got a lot of customers. Then finally she changed her sales model to self-service (so users buy it without contacting the Know Your Customer team), and she moved her marketing method to content marketing which scales better than the others.

    • Claire took the strategy of a comedian in her marketing - she first went around to small venues and tried different techniques (different jokes and punchlines for a comedian) (different marketing channels, people in her network, and public speaking at events) and she did this for two years and after she found her core message she went for the big venues for the scale (content-marketing online), this way she knew that her marketing material was tried and tested and would work.

    • No one has the right answer

    • Claire splits her work week across the various things that she’s working on. Monday-Tuesday is for writing. Wednesday’s are for the Watercooler community, Thursday-Friday is special projects or for long term thinking and visioning.

    • As a leader you must lead by example. And you must be consistent.

    • True collaboration and teamwork isn’t about everyone agreeing with each other. It’s about learning how to air out differences of opinion quickly, respectfully and making a decision and then move forward.

    • Jeff Bezos has a policy in meetings where everyone is allowed to aggressively argue out their opinions, but once the decision is made then everyone has to accept it. So if you can articulate your opinions very well, and sell people on them, you will do well.

    • Make sure that you enjoy the moment as you are.

    • Be careful of the advice that you receive. Everyone is biased towards their own experiences.

  5. 1

    @csallen are shows being posted on iTunes still? This one isn’t showing up for me on there.

    1. 1

      Whoops, forgot to publish this one :-D

      1. 1

        Haha no worries! Glad you’re pushing out shows again 🎉🎉