Valuing creativity over profit – with Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll, Coradiant, B2B, Consulting, Failure, Mental Game

There is one proven method I’ve noticed from interviewing successful founders. It’s a process that starts with understanding a customer’s pain and then addressing that pain.

That’s what today’s guest did. He started a consulting company, found a problem his clients had and then found a way to solve it on a repeatable basis.

Boom—he launched his company and it took off.

But then the internet imploded.

We’re going to hear the story of how he found his customer’s pain, how the market screwed him over, and how he recovered from it.

Alistair Croll is the cofounder of Coradiant, which provided web performance management.

Alistair Croll

Coradiant

Alistair Croll is the cofounder of Coradiant, which provided web performance management.

Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where you probably know I’ve done over a thousand interviews. The reason you know it is because I kind of show off about that number a lot.

Well, the reason that I’ve done all these interviews, the reason I started is because I wanted to understand what allowed successful companies to grow. Where do they even find their ideas? How did they know what to build? How’d they know how to sell it? I wanted to figure it out. What I discovered was there is no single method, but there is one method I’ve noticed a lot in my interviews. That’s a process that starts by understanding a customer pain and then addressing that pain.

Well, one way to do that is to do consulting, to actually do the work for your potential customers, see the pain firsthand by doing the work and experiencing it yourself and then creating a product that solves it. That’s what...

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