What Makes GoBe Special

A couple of investors have asked us “what makes GoBe special?” Well… we thought all of you would love to hear the answer.

1. The A-Team

Have you ever heard the expression, "the right people on the bus and in the right seats"? This is something I heard more than a decade ago, and it’s stuck with me.. It sounds easy but it's not so simple in practice because it’s advice that is abstract in nature. Again, defining who “the right people” are for your organization and defining the “right seats” so you can play to their strengths is hard because it’s way too abstract for most of us who don’t have the decades of experience hiring and managing A-players needed to gain a sharp intuition for this. One of our advisors Bryan Smith, who we call our "Human Capital Advisor", has mentored our team throughout the past year on how to vet and hire people using a very specific framework. And it's honestly like magic. Gone are the days of scanning through resumes, interviewing people and hiring on gut. That system is only successful at hiring for long-term fit about 18% of the time. With tools like Culture Index and GWC we are improving those odds to 80%+. We have hired all key roles using this method. Today, GoBe has a team that is second to none. Many companies don’t get hiring right. GoBe does.

2. Patent Protection

We have an exceptional IP strategy. GoBe just filed its fourth patent application and is getting ready to file two more. And GoBe is applying for key international patents, too. We estimate we will have 20+ US patents by the time GoBe is acquired or we go public. That's enough to make GoBe a formidable player in the space (and why we recently had a huge competitor reach out to talk to us!).

3. Innovation pipeline and lean startup methodology

Having exceptional sales like GoBe means copycats. But that doesn't scare us because we have patents to slow them down plus we’re always 10 steps ahead of the competition. We’ve shown you what we have coming down the pipeline in the next 18 months but there's a lot more coming. Innovating is what gets us out of bed every morning. We love this process. It’s a process that anyone can learn and master with hard work. But few companies really understand or are disciplined enough to follow the process. At GoBe we like to say, "if we can only be world-class at one thing, it's product design and making things people love to use."

4. Building an experiential brand

An amazing brand is an even more important strategy than all the patents in the world. When people know and love your brand, growth becomes exponential. GoBe is building an experiential brand that people love and share with their friends and family through word of mouth, or WoM. That's my favorite term in business: WoM. Because WoM is another way of saying “exponential growth curve” and is a true testament to who you are as a brand! Today, more than 80% of customers recommend GoBe to their friends. The significance of that can’t be overstated.

5. We have fun

Having fun is one of our core values. We conclude team meetings by asking everyone whether or not they had fun, and we regularly take everyone's pulse to see if they feel their work plays to their strengths or not. Why do we measure this? It's an upstream indicator of success in meeting our goals. On the flip side, if your team is not having fun, it's a warning sign that there are problems in the organization. By measuring this and seeking to improve it each quarter, we're uncovering issues long before they become big problems for the organization.

6. Commitment culture and transparency

What makes a team cohesive and productive? James Barron identified four main cultural blueprints used by startups: Commitment Culture, Star Culture, Professional Culture, and Autocracy Culture. One of these had a failure rate of 0% and is far superior to the rest: the Commitment group. That is, 100% of startups with a Commitment Culture reached a successful exit or IPO. That’s not to say that every Commitment Culture is guaranteed to succeed—all it means is that of the 200 companies studied, this one had a much higher success rate than the rest. The next best group (The Professional group) had a failure rate of 31%.

GoBe has a strong Commitment Culture. We are committed to our mission come rain or shine. We have purpose. It's what gets us all up in the morning. Another way to say this, is we have grit. And a lot of it. Grit predicts success more than anything else including luck and intelligence combined.

7. EOS (Entrepreneur Operating System)

Two years ago, a fund manager told us that he only invests in companieswho implement a Unicorn Operating System. Naturally that caught our attention. What does that even mean? He explained that in all his years of investing he has seen the lion's share of his success come from startups who operated their company using EOS (Entrepreneur Operating System). It's such an effective way to run a company and gain traction that every company would benefit from implementing the strategies and tools. Since we started implementing EOS one year ago we have achieved most of our 3-year goals already in the first year alone. It feels like a superpower.

That’s it. These are the 7 things that make GoBe such an exciting company to invest in. And the millions of dollars in annual revenue don’t hurt either! We got this!