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toaarcan · 5 years

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Scourge the Hedgehog: The Bad Fanfic Apotheosis

Y’all are gonna hate me for this one.

This is something of a followup to my previous post, Fiona Fox: Depth vs. Prominence, and inspired directly by the discussion I had with a friend in the comments section of the DA upload of it.

Part 1: Fanfic vs. Canon- Genesis of the Recolour Elements of the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic have long been compared to a bad fanfiction, particularly the parts of the story written by Ken Penders, though other writers like Bollers, Chacon, and Flynn have drawn that label too. I'm one of the people that's done it, and that's largely because I hold fanfic and official material to very different standards. There are certain things you can do in fanfic that you can't do in official material, especially with franchises like Sonic, and especially with more niche parts of said franchise, like a comic series. Of course, there are also certain things you can do in both, but you probably shouldn't. And Scourge is one of them. What exactly the process behind Scourge's creation was is something that's been debated. For a lot of people, he's considered to be a parody of the then-rampant "Sonic Recolour" fad, wherein fans would take screenshots of Sonic X, and other official artwork, and then edit it in Microsoft Paint, or another similar program, to create their own characters and stories. Now, this was long decried by other fans, myself included, as incredibly lacking in creativity and originality. It also had an "Ew, cringe" reaction, due to the often-shoddy editing, text-to-speech voices, and usually some top-tier mid-2000s Nu Metal for the music. These days, it's much easier to look back and say "These were mostly made by kids who were just having fun, and it's completely harmless", and it becomes apparent that a lot of the people that were making fun of them and criticising them were grown men, at which point you kinda realise that this "internet fad" was basically just bullying a bunch of children for not being up to the creative standards of some adults. Everybody was looking for the next Chris-Chan, but Chris-Chan is a near-unique entity, as only one other person alive has ever managed to combine that sheer void of talent with a monumentally repulsive personality, and that person is Ken Penders. But Sonichu is the least interesting thing about Chris, and Chris became the laughingstock that he is because of his inability to avoid posting his entire life on the Internet, which was something of a rarity in those halcyon days before the rise of modern social media. Sonichu was a gateway to the actually interesting content also on his channels, whereas these recolour-creators didn't have anything like that, just endless Windows Movie Maker slideshows. And, like, Chris was in his 20s when he became the Internet's punching bag for the first time, and while he's a horrible person, so were the people that dedicated their time and effort to trolling him- His story is fascinating, but it has no heroes. And into this collective cocktail of grown men shitting on preteens, so Ian Flynn introduced Scourge the Hedgehog. Is Scourge a parody of Sonic recolours? I sincerely hope not. The reason for that is twofold, and I'll discuss how his portrayal generally doesn't seem to be mocking those tropes further down the page, but the second issue with the idea that he is a parody is best explained by Sir Terry.

Parody can never punch down, and as a then-24 year old man writing official canon for a franchise, mocking a bunch of 10 year olds on the Internet for making bad stories would definitely be punching down. And, as I said, nothing about the way Scourge is written is in any way poking fun at the tropes of these fancharacters and stories. It's pretty much all played completely straight. So not only do I hope Ian wasn't trying to mock these fancharacters, but there's also little reason to believe that he actually was. He's not a parody, he is a send-up. And on the one hand, it's kinda nice to throw a bone to those kids. But on the other hand... is Scourge really the character you want to represent your part of the fandom in official material? A cruel, violent, abusive, vicious monster that spends his time palling around with a girlfriend that the writer reforged to be the most unlikable character in the entire comic? Yeah, can't say that's what I'd want if I were one of those people, but he seems to be popular enough, so maybe I'm in the minority there. But now we get to the meat of the problem. You see, the way Scourge is written is one of those things that you can do in fanfic, but you shouldn't do in canon. Part 2: What is a Mary-Sue? The term "Mary-Sue" gets thrown around a lot these days. It's gradually lost all meaning, and has slowly become a term for "Female character that I don't like," mainly used by whiny, easily-offended Broflake Youtubers, who get all pissy that Star Wars films aren't specifically catering to them, to the point that you only have to make a girl be good at something in a movie and these pissbabies lose their shit. I liked Episode VII and VIII more than I, II, or VI, get fucked. But what, then, is a Mary-Sue? And why is it relevant to Scourge? The answer to that first question is a lot more complicated than it might seem. Not just because there are now several different varieties of the trope, but also because the trope itself evolved as it began to be applied to non-fanworks, and additionally because the name itself is somewhat non-indicative. A male Mary-Sue can exist, though these are normally referred to as "Marty-Stue" or "Gary-Stue", or more cynically "The Protagonist". Check out the average Batman comic these days and you'll see what I mean. Originally, the term applied only to a self-insert character in a fanfic, that was an overly-idealised version of the author, dramatically overpowered, hugely popular, normally dating whichever member of the cast the author wanted to bone, or sometimes multiple partners at the same time, along with a few other traits. It's actually pre-Internet term, originating in a Star Trek fanzine when "Mary-Sue" was created as a parody of other fans' similar characters. Over time, the trope evolved to the point that, while the "author avatar" feature is still a pretty big indicator, it's not really necessary. So while there are probably plenty of people out there who want to be Batman, not every character that is a Mary-Sue is someone for the author to project themselves onto, and not every author avatar is a Mary-Sue. Generally, the important features of a Mary-Sue are now: 1) Receives a great deal of favouritism from the author 2) More powerful than the rest of the cast, often to the point of absurdity 3) Faces zero consequences for their actions. 4) Liked by characters that have no reason to do so 5) In a relationship with a character that has no reason to date them, previous relationships be damned. 6) Most importantly, the story will bend over backwards to give them easy wins, even in situations where they logically should struggle. You're probably starting to get where I'm going with this, and if you're not... Part 3: Creator's Pet Scourge is a Creator's Pet. He gets shown a fair bit of favouritism from Ian Flynn, primarily the guise of how much focus he gets. Scourge is the most prolific villain in Ian's run, aside from Eggman himself. While other, better villains like Mogul and Naugus were being imprisoned repeatedly until one retired and the other became a dog, and a huge chunk of the comic's remaining antagonists were being subsumed into the Eggman Empire, Scourge was only moving up, not only being the villain of Ian's first two issues on the book, but continuing to make sporadic appearances for the next twenty issues, before appearing as the new leader of the Destructix under Finitevus in the Enerjak Reborn arc, followed swiftly by a stint as the Big Bad in Bold New Moebius. Does he actually deserve this level of importance? You be the judge, but personally, I don't think so. Even within those stories, Scourge gets special treatment, the biggest and most obvious being Metal Scourge. Now, personally, I think Metal Scourge was a better character than Scourge himself, but the fact that, of all people, Scourge got a Metal counterpart before anyone else, including Knuckles, who had such a counterpart in the games for over a decade by that point. Especially since, well... Metal and Mettle is a fun story, but it doesn't really do anything for Bold New Moebius as a whole, does it? It's basically pure filler, only really serving to add another dead Metal Sonic to Ian's list and stall the plot out for a bit longer. And, of course, the most clear indicator of Scourge's favouritism is that he was he first Archie character to receive his own Sonic Universe arc, and the only one to do so without needing two or three SEGA characters also making up the rest of the lead cast. "Lockdown" isn't a particularly good story, but its existence speaks to not just the insane popularity that such an unworthy character received, but also Archie's willingness to indulge that. Sonic Universe was largely intended to tell stories revolving around the members of the SEGA cast that, for whatever reason, weren't able to regularly appear in the main book. This... frequently got broken, with Sonic, Tails, Sally, Bunnie, Antoine, and Amy all taking centre-stage in the book before obvious candidates like the Chaotix got a look in, some of them twice over, but Scourge was the only time they were willing to try a story based entirely around one of their characters, and they gave it to the already extremely prominent Scourge. It's pretty clear that Ian loved using this character, and did so as much as possible. YMMV on whether that's good or not. Part 4: Scourge OP plz nerf Let's be real, he's overpowered as fuck. Now, overpowered characters aren't necessarily bad, but it's significantly harder to write an OP character than an on-average one, and Scourge didn't work out so well. From the moment he turns green, he's basically unstoppable. The one time he actually seems to remotely struggle is actually in 161, where he looks ever-so-slightly winded after curbstomping Sonic and Shadow at the same time. From then on, while he does start to slowly even out with Sonic, he also continues to utterly demolish basically everyone else, especially his easy conquest of Moebius. It's been suggested that conquering Moebius should be easy, because the big threats are all good, kind people there, but that somewhat ignores that there are anti-versions of the heroes kicking about too. All the (Mostly) benevolent rulers of the Primeverse should be tyrannical despots there, and there are excessively powerful entities like the Anti-versions of Merlin and the Guardians, not to mention whatever horrors Anti-Gerald would've unleashed on the world, and that's without the Suppression Squad themselves. While the comic has generally treated Sonic as being able to stomp the entire rest of the FF, well, who says it has to be a fight? Why the fuck doesn't Patch just poison him? I mean, the obvious answer is "Because then Bold New Moebius won't have a main villain", and sometimes contractual villain immortality has to be a thing, but a good writer should be able to avoid putting the characters in that position. Following on from that, Scourge gets to fight basically the entire FF and Suppression Squad at the same time, (Sonic and Amy are absent and Fiona is on his side), and he's winning until Sonic shows up. Then directly after that is the hedgehog brawl, and despite Sonic managing to get everyone against Scourge, he easily manages to escape and break out his Super form. Even after spending his time in the No-Zone completely powerless, Scourge manages to break out the moment he gets his powers back, despite the prison being full of characters who should be equally or more powerful than him, and the police force that caught them all, basically unchallenged. Scourge never faces an actual challenge in the comic. He never struggles, and the one time he actually loses? Ian makes up some new lore on the spot, which is contradictory to SEGA lore from the same year, and then uses that to have Sonic trick Scourge into depowering himself. Not only does Scourge never struggle with anything, but he also never actually loses a fight. Part 5: When will you learn, that your actions have consequences?! Probably never, because Scourge's actions never have consequences. Throughout his entire run, Scourge gets to go wherever he wants, do what he wants, with or to whomever he wants, and he never has to deal with the fallout of the decisions he makes. Absorbs the energy of a matter world into his antimatter body? He's better than fine, it only made him stronger. Turns up in Knothole with his secret girlfriend's hated arch rival by his side? Never mentioned again. Blows Fiona's connection to him, costing Finitevus' operation a potential spy in Knothole, where Knuckles is? Not even considered a factor. Ditches Finitevus to go and make Moebius into an egopolis? Finitevus isn't bothered, and supports Fiona's efforts to rescue him later down the line after than plan backfired on him. Blinds Patch in one eye out of jealousy/spite? The guy that poisoned Armand and Max, took a torch to Antoine's personal life, took advantage of Sally's frayed mental state, emotionally damaged Bunnie, and tried to assassinate Elias to get what he wanted lets him get away with it. Openly announces that he's going to destroy both worlds? Conveniently does it when he's alone with Sonic so nobody can tell Fiona what she's letting herself in for. He eventually does get sent to jail, but he breaks out with ease the next time he turns up. Because, y'know, that's just what we want to see. Villains never having to deal with karma. Part 6: What does anyone see in him? Scourge doesn't quite get the "everyone loves him" treatment, but he still gets a whole lot more respect than he's ever earned. Both Sonic and Zobotnik are portrayed arbitrarily deciding that maybe there's a shred of good in this monster, and this is the part where I stress that he's abusive again. Maybe if I repeat that enough it'll sink in. Despite knowing full-well the sort of person Scourge is, Sonic's response to Scourge's crappy cribbing of the "One Bad Day" speech is to try and turn it around and claim that Scourge only needs a tiny bit of decency to be a good person, and this is outright untrue, and given what we see of Scourge later, I'm frankly disgusted that Ian tried to pull this with a character he'll pretty much unambiguously portray as an abuser. Zobotnik's case is even more baffling. We're introduced to the guy in the Lockdown arc, and it's implied that he's effectively a tyrannical warden, ruling over the No-Zone with an iron fist, taking an almost sadistic delight in punishing the inmates. But yet, for whatever reason, he decides that it's a good idea to try and rehabilitate Scourge, for no adequately established reason. Even on the other side of the morality line, we have Finitevus, who apparently respects Scourge enough to not just make him leader of the Destructix during the Enerjak Reborn arc, despite him very clearly not being a leader, and not being liked by any of his comrades except Fiona, but then when he promptly ditches the whole plan toward the end, Finitevus apparently decides that he not only wants to get him back, but is willing to go to great lengths and risk losing the only team of mercenaries dumb enough to work for a guy who is quite open about his intentions to "purify the world with Chaos fire" in order to do it. And speaking of, the most egregious case of this comes again in Lockdown, where the Destructix all end up siding with Scourge. Across the second half of the arc, Scourge learns his new team's backstories, and despite them clearly showing traits and beliefs that should make them respect him less, this somehow works in his favour, and he manages to wrest leadership of the team from Fiona. Especially galling is that it appears that Fiona loses their respect early on because of her faith in Scourge, who to them, looks pathetic, but then they end up supporting him anyway, despite doing nothing to earn it. But wait, one's missing... Looks like it's that time again. Part 7: Oh right, he's an abuser. It's time to talk about Fiona. Fiona's heel turn is really, really effective at selling you on the idea that Fiona is a vile, cruel, and selfish person. It's a dramatic, "big bang" moment that, in basically a single panel, got an entire fandom to hate a character. Now for some it was more of a "Love to hate" thing, but there are plenty of people out there who just really hate Fiona for this single moment. And when you're introducing a new major villain, maybe that's what you want to accomplish. What it doesn't do, however, is sell you on her motives for taking that course of action. Fiona, for the rest of her existence, mainly antagonises Sally, whom she has no worthwhile connection to on either side of her turn, other than being the evil Sally to Scourge's Evil Sonic, and stands around or clings to Scourge's arm, looking smug about her abusive relationship. And yes, it is abusive, verbal abuse is still abuse, and the implications that he's physically abusive are present too. I know this is something that Scourge's fans don't really want to accept, but it's true, and we're going to get into that later. For now, what matters is that this character's run as a villain mainly consists of: Fiona: "Hey Sugar-Queen, look at how much my boyfriend yells at me and insults me, and probably beats me when he's angry. I make smart decisions and you suck." We never come to understand why this character, who is so motivated by her belief that everyone will eventually double-cross her that she has decided to start lashing out at people before they can turn on her, is willing to put her faith 100% in someone so repeatedly deceptive that he first approached her by pretending to be someone else. Like, in terms of bad first impressions, that's up there with arriving at a job interview in full clown regalia. The comic makes no effort to show why these characters like each other. Scourge allegedly likes her because she chooses to turn evil and join him, rather than being born evil, but this clashes with not only the fact that Fiona is a genuinely good person before this, who makes a solid effort to stay loyal to her friends first, and is lured into villainy by him, but also the fact that she blames everyone but herself for her current situation, but especially with the fact that all of the foreshadowing for Fiona turning evil consists of people not trusting her because she has a shady history. Scourge claims to appreciate that Fiona is a good person that chooses to be evil, but the narrative has a clear message of "If you started evil, it doesn't matter if you try to become good, you will always revert to type." Which isn't exactly a good message, Ian. In return, all we get from Fiona's side is that Scourge "has no expectations of her and just wants to have fun", which clashes entirely with how we see them interact in subsequent arcs, where Fiona frequently looks disturbed or apprehensive, or just bored, while Scourge yells at her and threatens her for not meeting his standards. Seriously, why do people ship this? But okay, okay. Scourge is a good liar, and Fiona's established paranoia and history do make her vulnerable to manipulators like him, so maybe she falls for his lies and gets taken for a ride. That could happen, sure. Doesn't really explain why she becomes a horrendous person all of a sudden, but whatever. Maybe he convinced her to do it as a sort of hazing, and a means of ensuring she couldn't go back. That fits with his abusive nature (You might also notice that this the explanation I used in Revival). But why does she stay? And why does she refuse every out she's given? Why, after everything that pulled her to his side has turned out to be bullshit, does she remain devoted to him? Now, you can argue that due to the abuse and the manipulation she's suffered, she believes she has to stay with him, and that's a fair shout, but her appearance in Journey to the East is kind of a stumbling block for that theory, because we're shown a Fiona who is fully capable of functioning without him, and even after making efforts to establish herself... the next time we see her she's gone back for him. And now... well, it's time to talk about that "A" word I've been bringing up a lot in this section. Scourge is abusive. I've frequently referenced that he verbally abuses Fiona every time she displeases him across the book, but the most telling scene is this one from Issue 190.

"You do not want to be sent back with me." Translation: "If I get sent back, and you're sent back too, I'm going to beat the shit out of you." Fiona (With her invisible left arm) isn't excluded from this threat. Fiona isn't surprised by this threat either. Nor does she not take the threat seriously. She looks like she's expecting to be struck. He beats her. And please, nobody say that "he's just angry", that's apologism. Now, I dunno if this was in the script, or if Fiona's face was something Yardley did on his own, but given that this arc ends with Super Scourge announcing his intention to destroy both Mobius and Moebius, simply because he can, regardless of the collateral, I'm willing to bet that this relationship wasn't a happy, stable one. But, unfortunately, this element was never made clear enough. Now, your mileage may vary on whether you think Sonic the Hedgehog comics are the appropriate place to discuss abusive relationships or not, but we've got one now, and Ian dropped the ball. This wasn't a Joker/Harley, where the pairing was clearly abusive but also sold DC/Warner millions of dollars worth of merch, this wasn't a RWBY, where Adam took three years to show up and had already won a huge number of fans from his admittedly cool design and powers, so people already liked him before they even knew what his personality was like. Ian had full control over this, no merch to worry about, and Scourge's prolific appearances gave him plenty of opportunity to make it clear that this was an ugly, repulsive thing that Fiona needed to get out of ASAP. And he didn't. Because panels like this, and all the yelling, clearly weren't enough for the fandom. No, you point this detail out to them and they'll make excuses, try to pretend it didn't happen, or just get offended, or worst of all, outright say they don't care and still ship it. We have fanartists who became real official artists creating stories where this garbage-fire pairing is used for sad feels, not because Fiona got stuck in a relationship with a controlling, violent monster, but because oh no they really loved each other and now Fiona's dead isn't it tragic don't you feel sorry for Scourge? No. No I don't. I feel sorry for the thousands of teenagers who support an abusive relationship because Ian was too cowardly to make it clear that the relationship in question was just that. Now, do I think that Ian is an intentional abuse apologist? No. Do I think he wimped out of taking the necessary steps to make it clear that this was bad because he didn't want people to dislike his shitty pet villain? Oh yeah, I do. Scourge's reputation was more important to Flynn than appropriately and sensitively portraying a destructive, damaging relationship between a woman and her monstrous partner. Well, I say "Woman", let's not forget that Fiona was meant to be sixteen, and realistically if you take her timeline into account she's more likely to be about fourteen. Real fucking classy. Part 8: Effort? What effort? So, now we get to our final criteria. And frankly, it's the easiest one to cover. From the moment, Scourge turns green, his life becomes a cakewalk. Everything he ever wants is handed to him with zero actual struggle on his part. Wants to be stronger than Sonic? He is. Zero side-effects to using a Chaos energy form from a mirror universe, or having a Super transformation interrupted, he just seemingly gets to be half-Super forever. Wants another leg-up on Sonic? Here's Fiona, sans personality. Sonic says he's just a lame ripoff of himself? He conquered a planet in a week, look at how cool he is. Also his team all roll over and make him their leader even though they hate him and they could easily kill him. He gets to walk through the entire FF/Squad teamup, and the Hedgehog teamup, and then when he gets to the No-Zone, Zobotnik, who has kept far smarter and more dangerous characters locked up for decades arbitrarily decides to reform him and gets completely suckered by him. The Destructix fully throw in with him, despite him never actually earning their respect. He never loses a fight where he wasn't depowered first. You know what the irony of this is? Ian has a character whom he is contractually obligated to never have lose for longer than an issue or two. And honestly, he wasn't awful at disguising that. Sonic gets a few wins that feel too easy, but for the most part, the issues with this rule mainly manifest in Sonic's limp responses to the tragedies happening around him, and a sprinkling of minor failures and pyrrhic victories ensure that the rule looks more like shoddy writing in a few places unless you're explicitly told about it. And even then, he still manages to make it look like Sonic struggles to attain those victories, that he has to actually put his back into it every time. He is challenged. Scourge isn't allowed to be challenged. That's the irony. Ian has a protagonist who he is not allowed to have lose, and Sonic still manages to be avoid looking like a boring invincible hero, while Scourge just never faces anything that can actually pose a threat to him. Powerful opponents crumple before him. Characters' personalities and development shift to suit his needs. The plot warps to benefit him. Because heaven forbid Scourge actually have to work for his wins. Who needs stakes when you can have the writer on your side! Part 9: In summation... I think you should've all twigged where this is going by now, so let's wrap up. 1) Does Scourge receive a great deal of favouritism from the author? Yes. 2) Is Scourge more powerful than the rest of the cast, often to the point of absurdity? Yes. 3) Does Scourge face zero consequences for his actions? Yes. 4) Is Scourge liked or respected by characters that have no reason to do so? Yes. 5) Is Scourge in a relationship with a character that has no reason to date him? Yes. 6) Most importantly, does the story will bend over backwards to give Scourge easy wins, even in situations where he logically should struggle? Yes. According to these criteria, Scourge the Hedgehog is almost a textbook example of a Mary-Sue. Which is probably why something as disgusting as him got away with so much. I guess, then, that his role in Revival, and a lot of the stuff before that, is the unfortunate reality of a Mary-Sue who suddenly has to deal with the fact that they're no longer getting that special treatment from the writer. That now their actions have consequences, that now the universe doesn't shape itself to their desires.

#Sonic the Hedgehog #Archie Sonic #Ian Flynn #Scourge the Hedgehog #Fiona Fox #Evil Sonic #Critical #CW: Abuse #TW: Abuse

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topicprinter · 7 years

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TL;DR -- In prep for my first visit to SaaStr Annual, I binge-listened to all 95 podcasts and wrote down the highlights. In the original blog post we built a simple search app of the data set I created along with images of all the SaaS resources mentioned on the show. The rest of the text is below. Hope some might find it useful....Who needs a #drinkwithharry?Over the past few weeks, I tasked myself with listening to all ~32 hours of the SaaStr podcast, in preparation for the SaaStr Annual conference. Each show is an incredibly dense, 20-minute nugget on the business of SaaS. IMHO, it is totally and completely worthwhile to meander through twice-weekly.However. Powering through them all in one go was the equivalent of a Brain Blaster—more like binge-watching Planet Earth than Portlandia. Do as I say, kids, not as I do.So, what did I learn? Well, a ton. Let’s try to unpack the highlights with the Data, the Recommended Resources, the Words of Wisdom and, finally, the Personal Lessons.To the Data!As part of this journey, I put together a file that combines data from the RSS feed along with my own note-taking on each episode (typos and dirty data notwithstanding).[Note: Due to reddit formatting, here are the details of the data set]:The CSV file is available on GitHub.The Search App is inside the original post.The how-to on getting dynamic data into a static set using our cloud data pipes is in a secondary post.Fun facts:54% of episodes featured a CEO and/or Founder21% of episodes featured a VC or other InvestorThe remaining episodes (with a few exceptions) were with VP of sales, marketing or customer successOf the non-VC interviewees, there was a diversity of SaaS products on display. HR and Marketing companies were most prominent (~30%), but others ranged from security-guards-on-demand to shipping APIs to a Slack bot. It’s a big world out there.There were only two repeat guests (Jason Lemkin and John Barrows)The “60-second SaaStr” was nicknamed “the Churn” for a few early episodes. The “Good, that’s perfect, I think we’re warmed up” audio snippet appeared 43 episodes in. Were these the experiments and casualties of lean podcast methodology? We’ll never know.Recommended SaaS ResourcesThis is probably a good time to note that Harry Stebbings, the wunderkind interviewer, is a natural. In addition to tight, relevant questions, the brilliance of the show really comes down to the editing. 20 minutes is a perfect length and a huge differentiator compared to other tech and startup podcasts.One question Harry often asks (~55% of all interviews) is simply: “What are your favorite SaaS resources?” Interviewees answer with various blogs, books, podcasts, among others. I compiled each resource and grouped them by number of mentions. To make things a little easier to read, I also highlighted the books in blue:[NOTE: All the SaaS resources mentioned I grouped and, due to lazyness, just took a screenshot. Top four were SaaStr, Tomasz Tunguz blog, David Skok blog, & Mark Suster blog, but a long-tail of other interesting reads; for the full list, see the original postThere is a clearly a preference for SaaStr on these Saastr podcasts (weird!), but you clearly don’t want to miss out on Tomasz Tunguz or David Skok either. When you go to google "How to Castrate a Bull" make sure you add "business book" to your search criteria.Words of WisdomAs for actual content, where to begin? It’s an embarrassment of riches. So as not to write a novel, let me give you a taste by simply quoting from a handful of interviews (with gentle editing for clarity):Nick Mehta, Gainsight, Episode #24 on What Companies are Getting Wrong with Customer Success“#1 they think it is just about churn reduction… just the beginning of the story… it’s about upsell, expansion and most importantly about advocacy and getting your customers to be your best sales people…#2 they hire the wrong leader… maybe passionate about the customer and product, but not operationally focused…#3 they put it under another exec… part time responsibility of marketing or sales… #4 they make it all about people and heroics v. process… #5 they think about it as just the CSM team’s responsibility, when in reality that customer success team is the quarterback… but you need the whole company to rally around it.”Aaron Ross, Author, Episode 46 on the Most Common Reason Companies Struggle to Grow“Because they haven’t nailed a niche… you can have a big vision, but it means being very focused—baby steps—around the type of customer segments… who today you can find, talk to and who need you enough to buy from you… so you can double-down and grow fast.An old story, company has a product, anyone in the world can use it and get value from it, but no one is buying it. Where are you a need to have vs. where you are a nice to have? It’s hard to have the internal discipline in the early days to say these customers can all use us, but they don’t need it so much that they’re going to buy… got to focus on these 1-2 very specific areas… maybe not sexy… but enough of a pain there that they’re going to need us and go through all the huge time and energy and effort—the more-than-you-expect-process—to evaluate us, buy us and deploy us.”Russell Glass, LinkedIn, Episode #14 on Marketing within the Customer Lifecycle“At each stage… [customers] have certain information needs… and if you can, as a marketer, help them with those information needs at the right part of the journey of that decision, that is when you are relevant… that is when you are able to transcend being marketing material and move into the information universe.”Seth Besmertnik, Conductor, Episode #79 on Weaponizing Marketing:“Your marketing can be a weapon and core competency and differentiator… [for a crowded market] what ends up discerning the difference is the marketing… are people finding you?… do they know you exist? There are a lot of great software companies that are dead on the side of the road because no one ever found their business, no one found their product and they weren’t good at sales and marketing. So having a great product is the start, but it’s not how you get across the finish line.”Mathilde Collin, Frontapp, Episode #10 on Content Marketing Strategy“We have a process, first try to release at least two posts per month… and then always try to write 1/3 on market we’re in… 1/3 on our journey… and 1/3 about specific use case for customers”Peter Reinhardt, Segment, Episode #80 on Turning Up Product Market Fit to Eleven“[Early on] we managed to convince ourselves that pretty meager levels of customer excitement meant product market fit, which I think is an easy thing to do… I think customers have more dynamic range in their response to a product than most people realize… “oh that seems helpful”… 7 or 8 out of 10… but when you really hit a pain point, the customer’s dynamic range goes up to 11… and their response is totally different… like holy shit, can I get access to it today? I need to call this other person on my team who has been talking about this forever, how ’bout I introduce you? and you’re like “woah, woah” it doesn’t even exist yet, slow down… I think the customer’s dynamic range is much broader than we realized and so we never actually hit that 11 and just convinced ourselves that 7 out of 10 was product-market fit.”Ryan Smith, Qualtrics, Episode #83 on Necessity of Managing Runway“Rome wasn’t built in a day… it’s going to take time, if you can keep your options from a funding or partner standpoint to actually give you a long enough runway, entrepreneurs will figure it out. The problem is when they put a stopwatch on their back… every bet that we’ve made has taken a little longer than we anticipated… you don’t want to limit yourself to one point in time… you gotta play the long game.”Leo Widrich, Buffer, Episode #89 on an Embarrassing MVP“The quote… that you should be embarrassed by your first version gets misinterpreted a lot… you shouldn’t be embarrassed because it completely breaks or is unusable… that’s the wrong type of embarrassment… the type that is good is the embarrassment of richness… like, kinda embarrassed because it’s only this one feature and you wish you had done three more… it is complete unto itself… not the base layer of the cake, but, instead, a cupcake.”Personal Lessons LearnedIf there is one thing I’ve personally learned throughout this process, it’s that the 2x speed on a podcast app is probably the greatest invention of all time.But, as far as SaaS goes, I think what you receive through drowning in all this content is a solid understanding of the conventional wisdom of running a SaaS business, from early days to scale. Things like:Hire athletes in the beginning, specialize later.Initial product market fit is when you have 10 unaffiliated paying customersSales and Customer Success need to be working in tandem, given the necessity of retention in SaaSDon’t spend money on sales until you have a repeatable processFocus early on a single personaGet people to pay you earlyMore mojitos, fasterAnother cool thing about this binge-mission, should one accept it, is that you’ll certainly find a few tidbits that speak directly to your situation. For instance, I almost fell out of my chair when Harry Glaser of Periscope Data (Episode #30) was asked about greenfield opportunities in SaaS and then went on to lay out the problem that our startup, Flex.io, is trying to tackle:“I think one thing we see that maybe other folks don’t see there’s a lot of back end data munging and processing and kinda unsexy data things going on that are really being done with a collection of hacky python scripts right now… copying data from place to place, transforming data, storing data, all that stuff is being done by people writing scripts on the side… so I think there is a big opportunity there…”Let’s hope so, Harry!…Well, I hope this proved to be a useful summary for you, dear reader. May your SaaS companies flourish and may your mojito glasses never be empty! Hope to see you at SaaStr Annual.edit: formatting

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