Designing for Success: Focused, Customer-driven Approach to Launching Tech Products
The number one reason why startups fail is due to misreading market demand — found in a striking 42% of cases — along with pricing/cost issues, user-unfriendly products, poor marketing, and product mistiming. To put your business on a path that increases the chances of survival and future growth start with 1) figuring out who your aspirational customer is and 2) designing your go-to-market strategy around her needs. The last thing you want is to spend long hours designing and polishing the product that no one wants to pay for.
- Customer Discovery: defining your aspirational customer persona
Look for the people / businesses in your target market who are most deeply affected by the problem you aim to address — those whose pain is most pronounced.
Build 2–3 clear hypotheses around these customers’ profile, generate a pipeline of ~5–10 prospects that fit that profile, and reach out to them. The purpose of this exercise is to identify the niche of prospective early adopters that are the most excited about your product, and to understand their unique characteristics. The narrower the focus is in the beginning, the better. You want to start with signing up your first ~10 customers through your personal network, and grow this number by ~2% a week. If these numbers seem too small, definitely check out this article on the power of compounding: a few highly enthusiastic, committed early customers often have an outsize impact on startup growth at this stage. Quality matters more than quantity.
Spend a lot of time talking to these early adopters both to understand their initial reaction to your product and their persona.
Tell them about what you are building and the hypotheses you have around applications. How will you know if the customer is excited about what you are building? Well, they will start asking questions about the product in the context of their problem which will give you fresh value proposition ideas.
Ask them questions to get a sense of their personality / organization:
- What does their typical day look like?
- What social clubs/communities are they part of? What are their hobbies? Favorite Netflix Series? Health routine?
- Who are some thought leaders in their community? If you are building consumer facing company, what are their favorite Instagram accounts to follow?
- How do they consume information? Blogs/media outlets?
- If they were to talk about your company to their friends / partners / customers what would their elevator pitch look like?
Understanding where your aspirational customers are clustered and leveraging unique insights into their behavior will help you create clever, precisely targeted customer acquisition strategies, which is super important — especially if your tech component is weak.
2. Big fish in a small pond: creative customer acquisition strategies
Once you’ve identified your aspirational customer’s unique characteristics, you have the data to devise acquisition strategies tailored to their interests, habits, routines, and needs. Focus on those that are not widely available.
If you struggle to think creatively, here’s my mental exercise to get inspired: create a list of 5 companies that went to market in a very unconventional fashion (think Airbnb, Uber, Zapier, or Stripe), ideally from different types of monetization models and industries. Find YouTube talks with their founders where they tell their companies’ foundational stories (here’s the one with Brian Chesky at Stanford GSB), and watch them without overanalyzing data. Think about it as creating a set of cues on a subconscious level that will find a way to influence your conscious mind and translate that into different ideas relevant to your business.
A lot of what you be doing won’t be scalable, but by working closely with these aspirational early-stage customers, you will learn how to deliver a personalized product and user experience — which is critical for new ventures’ success in our era of widespread unbundling of many industries and players.
To summarize:
- You want to have 100 customers that love you, not 1000 customers that like you. Focus on cultivating quality over quantity in identifying with early-stage customers.
- The narrower the focus in the beginning the better. A small, concentrated group of enthusiastic early adopters has far more impact on early success than a large group of lukewarm customers
- · Don’t scale too fast. Bringing the product to the market is a marathon not a sprint; focus on building a solid foundation before you expand.
- · Bottom up analysis is more convincing than top down. Align yourself close to the customer and take your cues from them; let them guide your strategy, and don’t assume you know their motivations, desires, and needs from the jump.
These tips should help you create a focused, customer-driven value proposition and GTM, and integrate some of these insights into your product strategy. Additionally, understanding who the thought leaders are in the community you’re targeting enables you to devise more precise, targeted influencer and broader marketing and communication strategy.
