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Tag: Product

How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Since the dawn of man, every entrepreneur believes they have the magical product that is going to change the game, revolutionize the market, blaze the trail, and yes, make the world a better place. It’s the type of hyperbolic startup language we’ve come to quickly identify and dismiss because we know at the end of the day, venture capitalists don’t really back products—they back winning business models.

So, how do you skip the tech jargon and get straight to a hair-on-fire business model? There may be no better litmus test than that of the elusive “product-market fit.” Coined by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he defined it simply as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Product-Market Fit Is Startup Nirvana

Sounds easy enough, but the little description belies its massive business implications. This is the sought-after point at which you have identified the best target industries, buyers, and use cases for your product. Sales and marketing strategies become easily repeatable and, more importantly, scalable. It’s the great chasm between the “10x” investment return companies and the ones you’ve never heard of.

These days, most startups don’t fail because of the strength of their idea. It’s because they burn through cash without carefully planning for the crucial moment when customers actually want what they are selling. Achieving product-market fit is nirvana, and there are no shortcuts to nirvana. Fortunately, thousands of companies have gone before us, and there’s something to learn from their trials and tribulations.

Research, Personas, and Segmentation

Everything, and we mean everything, begins with an effort to understand the market landscape and key pain points. In researching the various industry verticals and potential buyers, you are on the hunt for your target customers. After all, they ultimately decide how well a product meets their needs.

Call us old fashioned, but we’ve long believed that the best way of conducting market research is actually talking to your potential customers face-to-face. Sure, you’ll get more data if you use online surveys, but the quality of that data will always be diluted. Especially at the beginning of your journey, you need to hear how a real, emotive conversation about your product evolves in real time. If you put in the work, your customers will tell you exactly what would make their lives substantially better.

We’ve talked before about the importance of using research to develop personas and market segmentation. As a reminder, segmentation is the partitioning of the full market into digestible parts—hopefully with customers that share similar behaviors and needs. Defining the attributes and characteristics of various target users is a great way to make sure everyone on the product team understands exactly who they are designing, building, and sweating for.

These personas aren’t set in stone—they should be revised as you learn more and more. After forming and reiterating on these personas, the next step is understanding their underserved needs. If you can address customer pain that is not adequately being soothed, you’ve stumbled upon pay dirt. In terms of market opportunity, pain is gain. All of this information is driving toward the creation of your value proposition, or how your product will meet customer needs better than the alternatives.

Prototyping, Iterating, Optimizing

Equipped with this information, you should be ready to create what’s sometimes called a minimum viable product. With the help of prototyping tools such as inVision, it’s never been easier to show your customers an interactive, high-fidelity version of your product—without actually having to build the whole thing.

This is a safe space for experimentation, feedback, and a low-risk way to glean deeper insights. The biggest disservice you could do to your product team is asking leading or closed questions that trigger a yes or no response. Engage your sense of curiosity and ask open-ended questions to encourage insightful responses. Only then will you be able to identify genuine patterns and refine the initial prototype into something that is delightful and addresses customer concerns.

Take It to Market

As any creator knows, you can get stuck in the spin-cycle of revision forever. The only real way to validate your hypotheses is by eventually taking your product to market. That’s when the lessons come fast, hard, and uncensored. Suddenly, you’ll have access to conversion funnel metrics, marketing economics, product engagement levels, utilization rates, and lost customer churn.

It will feel like trying to repair a bicycle while currently riding it downhill—but rest easy knowing that you don’t have to fix everything at once. It’s just about optimizing what you can control to make your sales process repeatable and scalable in your established vertical.

Things to Remember

  • Seek insights from your employees, especially those out in the field. Your operations team sees all the problems with the product and hears all the complaints from your customers. Set yourself up for success early by creating a frictionless process to get those insights to senior management.
  • There will never be one way to determine product-market fit. You need to embrace the mentality of a scientist by testing, tinkering, and questioning every data point. Use A/B testing with messaging, try different price points, and push everything as far as your conversion rates will allow.
  • There are so many useful tools out there, like how to calculate your total addressable market size. David Skok, the venture capitalist at Matrix Partners, wrote a great blog on this topic as well. It includes a list of the key questions you need to be asking yourself along each step of the product-market fit process. In addition, it has a calculator template to see how you can score your product-market fit.
  • Trying to be everything to everyone will result in you being nothing to everyone. Especially for startups, who are often working with a limited budget, it’s always better to have a narrow focus to start. Then, you can go dive deep in that one vertical, making you the clear industry expert in your domain.

To learn more about how to find the right product-market fit, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Need to Scale Fast? CEOs Can’t Just Focus On Engineering Benefits

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Scale Fast to Beat The Competition

Why do so many engineering-led CEOs have a hard time scaling their company? I’d estimate more than 90% of our clients are engineers first and become CEOs later. An engineering background is of great value today – inspired ideas, technical abilities, and intense drive bring great products into the world.

Unfortunately, the problem is that many of these products fail to scale fast, and dreams of  becoming the next unicorn are quickly squashed. Sadly, when this happens, the world doesn’t derive the benefits of the product the team has worked so hard to bring to market.

In today’s fast-paced market, having a strategy to scale fast is a key to staying ahead of the competition. And trust me, there is lots of competition. I’ve seen a lot of situations where suddenly a competitor figures out how to both mimic the technology and to bring it to market in a way that scales fast. The first-at-the-gate CEO is left baffled – wondering what these usurpers did right in order to scale fast and win the market.

It Matters Where Your Promise is Rooted

The difference between failing and succeeding often comes down to the promise that surrounds the product. Traditionally, it was enough to root that promise in the engineering behind the products – focusing on the technical benefits and features. But now, more and more products are scaling fast and taking hold of the market by basing their promises outside the realm of engineering.

Why Promise More Than Good Engineering?

It is no doubt very hard to accept that, in today’s world, the most “obvious” story isn’t always the “right” story to tell. What may be obvious to an engineer leading a company, is rarely as obvious, relevant, and compelling to your audience.

As more and more successful brands are realizing, the best stories don’t revolve around the engineering “outputs” of your efforts but rather the personal, social, and environmental “outcomes” they produce.

Quite simply, the most compelling outcomes are those that touch the core human needs of everyone, and which incorporate whatever positive impact your brand has on the society, people, or even the environment.

Searching for Meaningful Outcomes

To develop an outcome-driven promise that really changes the way people think, feel, and act, you need to see your product through the lens of true and meaningful outcomes.

As such, you need to interrogate your product to uncover how it can make people feel more positive, more connected, accepted, capable, and competent. Accounting for all the positive, human contributions that flow from your product and brand, help shape emotional outcomes that act like magnets – drawing people into your brand, filling them with desire for your product, and ultimately, leading them down the path to purchase.

Outcome-Based Promises Help Products Scale Fast

Outcome-based promises have great power because they resonate deeply on an emotional level that lies well below the surface. By addressing basic human needs and desires, they register internally in very significant ways. While people may not readily talk about these transformative experiences, they nonetheless are influenced by them in ways that lead to new ways of perceiving your brand and acting in its interests.

Suddenly, There’s a New Light Shining on Your Engineering

People drawn to a brand through deep meaning develop an appetite for information that validates and supports their decision to embrace the brand. It’s part of human nature. Because of this, when people are emotionally connected to your brand, they are primed to appreciate your engineering story too.

They may well have turned away if you had started with your engineering-based promise of solely features and benefits, but now, they now stick by you as they recognize your features within the broader context of your meaningful product story.

Develop your brand story on truly meaningful outcomes to engineer success, scale faster, and grow smarter.

Emotive Brand is a startup brand strategy firm.

How Do You Create a Product that Matters?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Whatever industry you are in, whatever kind of buyer you target, whatever distribution system you use, whatever your promotional budget,you can’t afford for your product to be a lemon.

It needs to stand out from the field in unique and meaningful ways.

This can be hard to accomplish when you’re working to business-as-usual.

After all, your competition is generally using the same technology, same ideology, and same processes to create, distribute, and promote its products.

And, even if you are able to jump ahead of the competition in some significant way, they’re able to catch up so quickly that your advantage is short-lived.

That’s why, in crowded, cluttered, and confused categories, it’s essential to break through, to rise above, and to matter in meaningful ways.

But we see many products fail to matter from the get-go.

Few notice when they come to market.

They find themselves quickly relegated to the blurry corners of the category, the internet, and the shelf.

Why do so many products fail to break through the clutter?

Because, all too often, product designers aren’t engaged around the idea of what makes a product truly matter to people today.

That’s because the company they work for hasn’t adopted a clear, concise, and compelling Purpose Beyond Profit.

The company is still doing business-as-usual and not taking steps to transform itself through meaning.

As such, the company’s product designers don’t seize the opportunity to design products that represent, encapsulate, and magnify the best intentions of the company.

The resulting products, while worthy unto themselves, don’t leverage, add to, or amplify a bigger story designed to differentiate and create appeal for the business.

In the end, too many products are too narrow in their goals; they are solely focused on the immediate problem or opportunity and do not benefit from deep insights into why what they’re building will matter to people.

When product people work toward a higher purpose, products that matter become a natural result

When a company is driven by a Purpose Beyond Profit, product designers join the rest of the company in working toward a meaningful ambition.

They design products that matter because the solutions they offer reflect not only an answer to the immediate needs of buyers, but also a carry a response to the more holistic hopes, desires, and aspirations of buyers seeking to create new meaning in their lives.

The nature, intent, and scope of that higher purpose helps product designers to craft ideas that matter.

This is not about adding a layer of purpose on top of the product, but rather it’s about baking the purpose into the product at the earliest conceptual stages.

Indeed, the starting point of design for products that matter isn’t technology

Rather, meaningful design starts with the lives of the people who will, one day, learn about the product, try the product, use the product (perhaps over and over again), and talk about the product, and the company behind it, with family and friends.

A Purpose Beyond Profit merges the holistic needs of buyers with what the company does and how it does it.

It is a guiding light, a purposeful stimulant, and an effective filter for designers of products, and for everyone else in the company.

As such, the products purpose-driven designers create work in a broader context than immediate problem solving, easier ways to do things, or new advantages owing to new technology.

Products that are vivid demonstrations of the business’s Purpose Beyond Profit

These are products that break through the clutter, rise above the crowd, and matter in powerfully meaningful ways.

People don’t simply “buy” these products, they “buy-into” the idea of the product.

They don’t simply “use” these products, they “incorporate” them into their lives.

They don’t simply “acknowledge” they use these products, they “advocate” the use of these products.

The results of buying-into, incorporating, and advocating, add to both the economic and emotional value of your business.

People look forward to your next product idea.

Not with the expectation of a simple “wow” feature, but with the heartfelt belief that your next product will, once again, help them create new meaning in their lives.

In other words, a new product that matters from a company people respect, admire, and support.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.