TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Crossroads
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The Challenge
You risk a sustainable business model and future funding by relying on a mix of hope your customers renew and manual, “in-the-weeds” work to retain them.
- If you don't fix this: You will waste your limited runway on the wrong goals, causing you to miss targets and wind down key programs or your entire operation.
- If you do: You will get market fit, building a profitable organization that funders and customers love that scales beyond you.
The Drivers
🎯 Target
You feel pressure to grow by entering new markets instead of going deep into specific ones you’re best set up to win and own.
🔑 Offering
You’re worried you’re building the wrong things for your audience or your advocates (and customers) can’t easily articulate what you do and why.
🤝 Experience
You are only "hopeful" that your current customers will stick around, forcing you to guess at the outcome and missing opportunities to fix issues before it’s too late.
The Solution
Growth Made Simple
Hyper-actionable tools that help you build a scalable system and a team that proactively prevents and fixes churn -- so you can get to market fit and finally get the headspace to truly lead.
The pricing we discussed is only for the items we reviewed on our call. Any other items we did not discuss are potential future projects to explore.
🎯 Target
Nurture Your Best Niche
Laser focus on the niche you’re best set up to own and grow.
Win more valuable clients and stop dropping the balls that matter most.
What is a niche?
- A niche is a clearly defined, narrow audience, often grouped by observable traits like role, field, or demographics that point to likely needs.
- Examples:
- Salesforce first focused on overlooked SMBs.
- Facebook started with Harvard students.
Step 1: I want to define my best niche better.
Deliverable
1) Best Niche Profile
We’ll identify buyer niches that sets you up for success, including their top core unmet needs.
Discovery & Validation Toolkit (Optional Add-On)
- This toolkit uses focused discovery or small pilot launches with your target profile to learn what truly matters and refine your core ideas before sharing them widely.
- This makes this deliverable a living, shareable document, not a static one, best representing your latest understanding of your audience.
Step 2: I want to improve how I approach current leads. (Step 1 Completion Required)
Deliverables
1) Quick Win with Draft Multimedia Playbook Document
Quick Win: Take a relevant task reflecting how you do things today.
- This gives you immediate support and lets us learn your system from the inside. For instance, I can help nurture a prospect, build a proposal, or onboard a customer.
- You’ll also provide key context and examples of "good" vs “bad,” which I’ll use to deliver the first drafts and then workshop so it’s “ready to send.”
Draft: Draft playbook, based on what we learn.
- This first draft of a new, improved playbook aims to make your process more repeatable.
- This can include things like reusable templates, checklists, and a process map about who does what when so this can scale beyond you.
2) Pilot with Validated Playbook
Validate: Use it in a real situation and refine using levers below.
We test the full playbook by using it in a real situation. This involves picking the best options from the menu below to reduce friction and prove the system works.
Refine: Draw from the most relevant levers.
To address our top challenges, I’ll update our playbook with simple, proven levers that help us tackle them and reach our goals more easily.
3) “Proactive Nurturing” Dashboard
This is our single source of truth for managing customer relationships. It helps us prioritize opportunities, track key conversations, record insights, and assign clear next steps all in one place.
🔑 Offering
Play a Game You Can Win
Plant a flag on the offering category you’re best set up to own and grow.
Sell faster by cutting through the noise and never building offerings from scratch.
What is an offering category?
It’s the game or model your audience already understands, which forms the “core thesis” of your offering. When they hear it, they immediately get how you help and who your competitors might be.
Examples
- Salesforce: Cloud-based Enterprise CRM.
- Facebook: B2C social networking platform.
- Formats: Hackathon, Roundtable, Research Paper, etc.
Step 1: I want to define my best core offering better.
Deliverable
Best Offering Profile
Uncover reusable offering categories that help your niche understand and get excited about what you do within the first 30 seconds.
Discovery & Validation Toolkit (Optional Add-On)
- This toolkit uses focused discovery or small pilot launches with your target profile to learn what truly matters and refine your core ideas before sharing them widely.
- This makes this deliverable a living, shareable document, not a static one, best representing your latest understanding of your audience.
Step 2: I want to improve how I approach my current offerings. (Step 1 Completion Required)
Deliverables
1) Quick Win with Draft Multimedia Playbook Document
Quick Win: Take a relevant task reflecting how you do things today.
- This gives you immediate support and lets us learn your system from the inside. For instance, I can help nurture a prospect, build a proposal, or onboard a customer.
- You’ll also provide key context and examples of "good" vs “bad,” which I’ll use to deliver the first drafts and then workshop so it’s “ready to send.”
Draft: Draft playbook, based on what we learn.
- This first draft of a new, improved playbook aims to make your process more repeatable.
- This can include things like reusable templates, checklists, and a process map about who does what when so this can scale beyond you.
2) Pilot with Validated Playbook
Validate: Use it in a real situation and refine using levers below.
We test the full playbook by using it in a real situation. This involves picking the best options from the menu below to reduce friction and prove the system works.
Refine: Draw from the most relevant levers.
To address our top challenges, I’ll update our playbook with simple, proven levers that help us tackle them and reach our goals more easily.
3) “Continuous Improvement” Dashboard
This is our single source of truth to tracking our results and feedback related to our offerings.
🤝 Experience
Detect & Repair Early
Use a customer success journey to engage deeply and fix retention risks early.
Empower your team to drive customer satisfaction and expansion confidently.
Step 1: I want to define my customer success journey better.
Step 2: I want to improve how I engage my current paying customers. (Step 1 Completion Required)
Key Deliverables
1) Quick Win with Draft Multimedia Playbook Document
Quick Win: Take a relevant task reflecting how you do things today.
- This gives you immediate support and lets us learn your system from the inside. For instance, I can help nurture a prospect, build a proposal, or onboard a customer.
- You’ll also provide key context and examples of "good" vs “bad,” which I’ll use to deliver the first drafts and then workshop so it’s “ready to send.”
Draft: Draft playbook, based on what we learn.
- This first draft of a new, improved playbook aims to make your process more repeatable.
- This can include things like reusable templates, checklists, and a process map about who does what when so this can scale beyond you.
2) Pilot with Validated Playbook
Validate: Use it in a real situation and refine using levers below.
We test the full playbook by using it in a real situation. This involves picking the best options from the menu below to reduce friction and prove the system works.
Refine: Draw from the most relevant levers.
To address our top challenges, I’ll update our playbook with simple, proven levers that help us tackle them and reach our goals more easily.
3) The “Early Detection” Dashboard
A simple dashboard to track and fix low customer health.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will our work together slow down my current sales or marketing efforts?
We know it can feel urgent to grow and worry that this work will slow things down.
Our answer is always the same: it won’t. We believe strategy and sales should move forward together as parallel tracks. In fact, your sales and marketing efforts are the best way to test the ideas we work on right away.
What if I feel like I don’t have enough customers to do this work?
Even a small list is a great starting point. But we won’t stop there. We’ll create smart guesses about who your best customers could be, then use that to help you reach out to new people and expand your “sample size.” A small customer base becomes a tool to test your ideas, not a roadblock.
What if the niches we identify don’t care about what I’m offering?
Treat every first sales chat like a learning moment. If your message doesn’t land with the person you hoped to reach, that’s useful. It tells you your positioning might need to change. Use that feedback to adjust your approach fast, so you can find what works.
Why is it so important to identify these core profiles and focus?
Margin: Focusing helps you build a profitable and scalable business model.
If you do one-off projects or features, you might make money at first, but your operational expenses will be very high, much like a custom dev shop.
This efficiency concern goes beyond internal operations. Without a strong profiles, you waste time and effort trying to sell to people who were never the right fit, or offerings that confuse and don’t resonate with them.
Marketing: Focusing also helps you scale your growth.
When your message is all over the place, it’s tough for people to figure out what you actually do and why they should choose you.
This is a problem because you end up being forced to do 1x1 calls with people one at a time, giving time-consuming sales pitches and demos to clear up confusion. While this is okay to start, relying on this long-term becomes a bottleneck that prevents you from growing exponentially.
Value: Focusing also builds sustainable competitive advantage.
When you stay focused, you invest resources into deep work. With that investment, you build something that is radically valuable for many people, not just “okay” for a lot of different types of people.
There were moments when I could not see light at the end of the tunnel. I survived because of his guidance and support.
Dan Wu has been an exceptional executive coach. In short, there were moments when I could not see light at the end of the tunnel. I survived because of his guidance and support. He has provided invaluable strategic guidance with a diverse array of problems — including target market selection, GTM opportunity prioritization, operational efficiency, grant proposals, sales, pricing, negotiation, product strategy, & board management — helped me secure new revenue and validate emerging business models. His responsiveness, project management skills, and proactive approach have also helped me enhance organization, focus, and clarity to our GTM and revenue operations. Dan's coaching has been instrumental in tackling challenges in real time, and his ability to pivot seamlessly based on new information has proven invaluable. He is also a pleasure to work with. In summary, I wholeheartedly recommend him to any organization seeking transformative growth.
- Executive Director, JustFix (funded by Robin Hood, Open Society, & Chan Zuckerberg Initiative)
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About Me
Dan Wu, JD/PhD
Lead Innovation Advisor
I help you innovate safely by making sure growth and governance go hand-in-hand.
SVP of Product & Chief Strategy Officer.
- As a go-to-market-focused product leader, I’ve led and launched products and teams at tech startups in highly-regulated domains, ranging from 6 to 8 figures in revenue.
- Led core products and product marketing key to pre-seed to E raises across highly-regulated industries such as data/AI governance, real estate, & fintech; rebuilt buyer journeys to triple conversion rates; Won Toyota’s national startup competition.
Harvard JD/PhD focused on responsible innovation for basic needs.
- Focus on cross-sector social capital formation, with a strong background in mixed-methods research.
- Selected as a National Science Foundation fellow & published on responsible strategy and innovation in outlets like Oxford University Press, Fast Company, and TechCrunch.
First-generation college student prioritizing inclusion and belonging in his practice.
- I was raised by a single mother without a high school degree.
- I’m passionate about mentoring and coaching using methods that “works with” (versus “do to”), sensitive to one’s constraints and experiences.
Joyful Ventures © All rights reserved. Please do not share this page without my consent.
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