Initial Start Up Strategy

Initial Idea

I believe founders or aspiring founders often overthink when it comes to building product, and setting out their initial go-to-market strategies. Of course, if you are building a product that has a huge legacy incumbent, you likely need to create something that is significantly better or cheaper than what your customers are already using. However, when it comes to positioning your product on the market, it's probably better for it to look similar to the software that the customer is already used to buying.

Many of the largest companies today had very similar initial go to market strategies. For instance, Stripe and Twilio, both API-focused companies, started their initial go-to-market strategies by marketing directly to developers at early stage start ups. Stripe was able to fix the massive headaches that implementing online payments caused, and also made pricing much more transparent. They also used a bottom-up approach, where the served developers that would then push the purchasing decision to executives.

Some other examples might be Zapier, or Slack. Zapier has a very generous free tier that allows employees to actively use the product for free, then start charging once their customers can't live without it. Slack gives you a generous free tier as well, then charges customers to let them take administrative control of the product.

Here are some key points you should have down:

1. Target a niche

It's better to have 100 users that absolutely love your product, than to have 100,000 users that just kind of like it. Having 100 users that absolutely love your product is more valuable as you have found your target audience that you can cater to. User feedback at this stage is key, and as long as there are more similar users, you have a rocket ship.

2. Start Easy

Target the low hanging fruit, and charge as soon as possible. You want to start with customers that are easiest to get, such as those that are willing to use a start up and willing to talk to you, but you also want to start charging as soon as possible. You'll discover two key things here. Whether the customer would actually pay for your product, and if they would, what their needs would be in order to continue paying for your product.

3. Avoid Bad Customers

In the beginning of building Popl, we honestly weren't fully sure which direction to go. We didn't start off as a digital business card, and instead, we started off just as a way to share your social media and website links. We spent a lot of time grabbing user feedback from the wrong demographic. You don't want to try to cater to every single customer's feature request just because they are asking for it, and instead, make sure the request feeds into your overarching goal.