In one of my earlier posts, I wrote down my most important learnings from my startup stint. One of those things was titled – GTM > product.
In essence, what I wanted to say is that finding the right go-to-market strategy is probably more urgent than building the perfect product. And probably as important as knowing what the perfect product for your market is.
- Tech is a lot more democratic now than before. Cloud infrastructure, frameworks, great product examples to learn from – all this and more mean that the question “Can you build it?” is not as critical as it used to be, say 10 years back.
- Marketing channels are more saturated, and therefore, more expensive than before.
- As my co-founder Chaitanya used to say, marketing gets you users, product keeps the users. But most startup attempts die because of lack of new users, and not user churn.
A friend planning to start up reached out to me asking for my advice on how to come up with the right GTM for their product. I don’t think I’ve enough experience nor the content to write a book on this. But a lot of resources, and my experience in retrospect, have helped me create my own checklist or framework, if and when I decide to start up next. If it helps other people, even better.
Here’s the list. And I’ll link to the best articles or books that helped me on those specific points.
1. Users
Figure out your users, their lives, their pain points. You think your solution is perfect for them. But please, please, do talk to them. Even if you’re yourself a member of your target user segment (millennials who work in a tech job, for example), still talk to others. Because more often than not, you are projecting your own idiosyncrasies and biases on your users.
Read this book, The Mom Test, for the most unfiltered, maximum bang-for-the-buck playbook on how to do user interviews right. If I could change just one part of my startup attempt, it would be to have read this book before I started. I know that everything that followed later could have been figured out with or without a book.
2. Positioning
If you’ve worked at a high growth startup or a biggish company, this should come as no surprise to you. But it’s so inconspicuous, it’s laughable.
Products in a big or mature market rarely differ too much. Yes, there are features that vary. Some things are easier in one product than the other. But many products are able to not just survive, but also make good money.
Ever wondered why there are so many successful cars in the market? It’s nowhere as concentrated as software, where typically, we imagine that there’s just one (or maybe two or three) winners out there.
Cars perform a utility. And the technology has been around long enough that it has matured. To a layman consumer, the difference is hardly perceptible. So cars try hard at making you feel a certain way, as a driver or an owner. They will use ads, the sales experience, and the choice of product features to do that.
Software is well on its way to that phase. A lot of software product categories – productivity, analytics, communication – already have a lot of potential choices for buyers. With little difference in what the product enables for the users.
In this scenario, why you exist, why you should matter more to a certain set of users, and who are those users, are key questions to answer to figure out your positioning.
April Dunford’s book, Obviously Awesome, was again one of those no-nonsene, highly actionable business books that talks about these questions, along with a very usable exercise you can do for your own product or market. It’s a great playbook to ask yourself these questions.
3. Early traction
How will you get your first X users?
X could be 10 for an enterprise product, 100s for a consumer product.
The default answer to this is some sort of social media marketing. And invariably, Facebook.
But it’s worthwhile to spend some more time on this.
- Can you reach out to your network – preferably not your immediate friends and family – to find your target users? You will have a more continuous feedback loop.
- Consider cold emails or DMs or following up on posts to tap into existing demand.
- Even when considering paid marketing, can you tap into existing demand? Can you get users super cheap? (Note that this may still be possible at low scale, and it’s important to remind yourself that this channel, at this same CAC, will saturate pretty soon.)
4. Optimizing for the first X users
What will you optimize for when you have the first X users on your app?
Speed? Functionality? Aesthetics?
For a long time, I had the wrong concept of the ‘lean’ minimum viable product. This illustration helped clear this so well in my head, that I’ll just leave it here.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the original source, and it’s been floating around for a bit on Twitter.
5. Path from the first X to 10X or 100X users
It is intuitively easy to accept that what worked in getting the first X users won’t likely work for the next 10X or 100X users. So what next?
Unless you are cash-rich, or have figured out a marketing channel with insanely low taxes, you will need to rely on product-driven growth – either using tangibles like file sharing, or intangibles like product delight. Note : I am not saying product features will drive growth. But product features that catalyze usage or word-of-mouth can.
As product owners, we over-index on the belief that our product will be so good that users will talk about us. If we add referral points, everyone will share, and everyone will sign up. We underestimate the friction, the barrier that a new user experiences in understanding our product. We have spent so much time on the product, that we cannot imagine people taking time to ‘get’ the product.
For one, people have 100 things to worry about, and your product is one too many to get the share of their mindspace that you deem to be fair. And, one or ten appreciation tweets every day are but drops in the ocean.
Find ways to integrate with your user flows that amplify either word-of-mouth (TikTok watermark in all social media channels), or onboard non-users on to your app seamlessly without friction (like Dropbox filesharing, Zoom).
What can you do with your product that can drive these actions?
Then use marketing on top of this.
6. Pricing
It’s the last thing product people think about. Patrick McKenzie (patio11) writes about this problem in SaaS.
Technical founders often produce pro-sumer applications that they could see themselves using, then attempt to predict what a business would be willing to pay for it based on linear extrapolation from their own valuation of it. Unfortunately, technical founders perceive code as being worth its cost, and its cost to them is zero. Linear extrapolation from “slightly above zero” is not a happy result for the business.
Work out your unit economics. Don’t underestimate sales and administration costs. Travel costs. Sales cycles. Factor all that in. You don’t need to get all the answers right in the first go. But as all good frameworks do, it tells you what you know, and what you don’t but you should figure out.
I remember the first time someone questioned our pricing. We were planning/hoping to undercut incumbents by a lot. As we figured out the underlying infrastructure costs, and the bottom-up adoption story went out of the window (because our value props aligned more strongly with the customer, not the end user) – driving up CAC, we realized how naive we were a couple of months too late.
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