Hey Reader,
At some point, whether you've been tracking Palantir, been in startup, software, or product circles, B2B, B2C, or anywhere in between, you've heard the term forward-deployed engineer. Sounds expensive. Sounds technical. But it's really about something universal. Making your customer’s success inevitable.
Many founders stay busy doing horizontal fluff. Universally applicable work that looks productive but helps no one specifically. Forward-deployed founders do the opposite. The deep, unscalable, customer-embedded work that builds real commercialization muscle.
It's just about the quickest route to making your customers' lives easy and maximizing your position as a company. Less of a title, more of a mindset.
And while it's more of an enterprise software thing, the idea travels anywhere a user’s success drives your success.
The core is that your job isn't to ship code, or slides, or promises (it is!) but also to embed yourself so deeply inside your customer's world that you can manufacture their success. Make it inevitable.
Starting in pre-sales by bridging the objections of this is too hard, we don't have the capabilities, now is not the right time... and turning them into yes. And when they're ready, making sure it does everything and anything they need it to do.
More explicitly. A forward-deployed engineer is just a tech term for retention. A tech term for land and expand. It's how you convert, drive adoption, expand your footprint, and in doing so drive real NRR.
When you remove their friction, you remove their reasons to leave.
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Starting A Startup: Build Something People Want
Every founder starts at zero. No one starts with a product, customers, revenue, or a real clue how it will all play out.
Failure is the result of not doing everything in your power to turn your nothing into something. It's that simple.
Want to get in front of 140,000+ founders at $3 CPC? Go here.
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The Problem Isn’t Your Product
This concept matters because so much of the friction in adopting new software right now isn’t about the software itself. It’s time-to-value and all the shitty steps between right now and actually seeing that value.
Essentially anything from the left side of the deal (the annoying sh*t that just has to be done) to the right side (the customers capabilities as an organization) makes it easier to say no or it's just too much right now.
Maybe your prospects are not rejecting your product, but rather rejecting the overhead of what it will take to be successful. It’s not that they don’t want to save a billion dollars a year; it’s that it’ll cost them two billion in headaches, training, deployment, secops, contracting, internal processes, support, integrations and everything else to get there.
So as you think about this word frictionless, which founders are told to fall in love with, in the early days it doesn't exist. It can't because you just don’t know enough about the frictions you are solving.
Your version of frictionless probably means the customer is doing all the work. That’s not frictionless, it’s friction-for-you-less.
If you want real frictionless for the customer, you have to eat the friction. The setup, integrations, onboarding, support - it all just migrates. Someone has to pay the friction tax, let it be you.
That’s what ‘forward-deployed’ actually means. You absorb the pain so the customer doesn’t have to. Frictionless isn’t about removing the friction, it’s moving the friction from their side of the table to yours.
A whole lot of words to say: Do it for them.
The Forward-Deployed Playbook
Every early-stage founder should, must, think like a forward-deployed engineer.
That means you set up the integrations yourself, sit on the customer’s Slack until it works, write the scripts, the onboarding guides, the SOPs, the everything.
Where you become the single most reliable human in their company for the problem you solve.
Don't confuse this with support. The word is embedded, building trust one moment, one win, one friction removed at a time. This isn’t about high-touch theater and you shitty onboarding funnel; the customer has to be the one to WANT it not NEED it.
Everything we are trying to do is mitigate the opportunity for a customer to say no. That’s it. There are three pillars to this.
- Phase 1 was [Friction]: Mary Kondo your product. Find the friction. Listen to it. Follow it. Friction is the truth hiding underneath your assumptions.
- Phase 2 was [The Golden Handshake]: Time-to-value, time to truth. Shorten the gap between commitment and payoff. Because the faster a customer feels a win, the higher the likelihood they stay.
- Phase 3... this email... Doing the work that makes that value happen. The unscalable stage where you do everything to make your customer success (and yours) become inevitable.
Because once you’ve found the friction (Phase 1) and collapsed the distance to value (Phase 2), there’s only one thing left to do… fix it.
The Hidden ROI: Friction as R&D
Forward-deployment is strategy. Whether you are offering because you have aps in your product or because you align to the concept, is irrelevent.
I hear you....
It’s not scalable.
It’s not efficient.
BULLSHIT.
It is scalable.
It is efficient.
Because you either charge directly, indirectly, or bake it into the cost. (and services revenue is fantastic revenue!)
The value you are trying to find is in friction signals and redefining your relationship with what friction means - from a nuisance, failure, mayhem, crisis.... into a new way of looking at it:
- Friction is market research disguised as customer pain. The moment you fix a manual pain point, that cost is an R&D expense, not a service expense!!
- Every manual fix gets you one step closer to a better experience for the next user, it becomes the prototype for automation. Every human interaction you build today is in the API tomorrow.
That’s how product-market fit actually happens. One manual, hard-earned, gut-wrenching, I can't believe our user had this awful experience, forward-deployed fix at a time.
The Universal Principle
This isn’t just a B2B playbook and FDE isn't always a person, sometimes it’s a product decision. Forward-deployed can be cultural design, empathy embedded in the experience.
- In B2C it might mean embedding empathy into design where you’re still doing the work, just in advance. (the unboxing, the experience, the thinking, the moment... doing the mental work for then)
So do the work, wherever it lives, until the customer feels the win without having to feel the work.
The FounderOS Law
A founder who’s willing to live in the customer’s world, eat the friction, feel the pain, and turn it into leverage is going to be the one who learns the fastest, and that is the first step to building inevitability.
If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
- James
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