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10 Product Expansion Opportunities In 2021

1/21/2021

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Tired of generic 2021 predictions about remote work, cloud, and data? Here are 10 specific trends to consider in your growth strategy:

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Identify Your "Must-Have" Customers

12/23/2020

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Who are the people that can't live without your product? Why is that product a must-have for them? And what is the difference between these must-have users compared to other users for whom it's just a nice-to-have? These questions are at the root of scaling growth. Find your must-have users.

Yet, when planning target markets, it’s human nature to want to go broad. There is a feeling of safety and comfort. “Why, my product has hundreds of uses, for everyone! Let me list the ways…” But one of the great paradoxes of growth is that, in general, the more broadly you define target markets, the less business you actually take in. It literally pays to get more targeted.

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How To Infuse Customer Insights Into Your Strategy

12/18/2020

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Now that you've read the The Complete Guide to Customer Research Interviews, you know that gathering intelligence from customer interviews, market analysis, online research, win/loss analysis, is critical to developing a strategy that drives product-market fit and growth. But once you have accumulated all your customer and market insights, what do you actually do with it? Here are 5 immediate steps to infuse your strategy with intelligence in practice.

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What Is A Single-Threaded Owner?

12/17/2020

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Popularized by Amazon, a Single-Threaded Owner (STO) is a leader who is 100% dedicated and accountable to a new initiative such as inventing a new product, launching a new line of business, or executing a digital transformation. The Single-Threaded Owner is responsible for turning strategy into real results.

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Be Honest: Are You Building a Commercial MVP, or a Prototype?

9/23/2020

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In many industries, sales is used to ‘selling’ the vision of the product in advance of it being built, and customers assume vapourware by default. No one bats an eye because we’re accustomed to the idea that engineering will always be able to fulfill whatever we’re selling, given enough time and money.

New technologies like machine learning and blockchain offer a world of possibilities, but many of these possibilities may not actually be able to be implemented in practice, even with a huge budget. It's easy to promise "The product will automatically predict X with high accuracy." where X could be anything from detecting a security breach to predicting stock prices to finding the perfect outfit for you wear. But even if the prototype is already 70% accurate, it may never get to 80%, or whatever you need it to be to be commercially viable.

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Your Funnel, 2 Quarters Out

9/9/2020

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Most companies are laser-focused on meeting the current quarter's target, with an all-hands-on-deck effort by sales, marketing and product to close the gap by quarter-end. There is usually also a funnel of opps and leads for next quarter. But what about 2 quarters out?

​Short-term revenue is the lifeblood of the company - you don't survive very long if you don't make your number. So companies get good at meeting their target quarter-to-quarter. But one day the current quarter does not look good. The funnel is just not there. Maybe you've saturated the market, or there's been a disruption, or maybe you just didn't have enough funnel-generating activity 6 months ago. Now you're in trouble, and no amount of short-term execution can solve it. Don't fall into this trap!

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How To Not Flatline (And Achieve Continuous Organic Growth)

8/6/2020

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Product and service offerings follow a growth lifecycle:
  1. Product/market fit - you have a great idea but need to figure out the formula for repeatable growth - what market, what problem are you solving, who will pay for that, how to monetize, how to make it a repeatable formula. Many startups fail if they can't figure this out.
  2. Growth - once you figure out the formula, you can scale up sales, marketing and product to operationalize the growth, meeting quarterly targets. Riding this wave, owners need to judge whether and when to sell, or keep going.
  3. Flatline and Decline - eventually, offerings hit a flatline period where their traditional markets are starting to be saturated, commoditized, or disrupted. Growth is hard, your operational leaders are hammering away at what used to work, wondering why it's not generating the same result, all the while playing politics to stay afloat. 
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Once you hit Flatline and Decline, it is very hard to bounce back. Stories of flatlining businesses that suddenly take off again are rare indeed. While there are ways to resuscitate a flatlining business, the ideal is to NEVER GET THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE and instead take the right actions to ensure continuous growth.
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How to Transform Legacy to SaaS: A Blueprint

7/16/2020

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SaaS businesses are all the rage! Even companies that have success with traditional products are re-thinking their business as a SaaS offering, to reap the many benefits:
  • Valuation. Even if all you sell is basically the same product to the same customers, but on a "SaaS" model, that can be enough to attract new investors and increase your valuation by an order of magnitude.
  • Recurring revenue. SaaS implies a subscription model, which lends itself to more recurring revenue, or at least more predictable recurring revenue.
  • Additional revenue streams. SaaS businesses can collect and monetize anonymized customer data, including patterns of customer behaviour. They can serve ads to different customer segments, or upsell partnering products.
  • Product stickiness. Customer behaviour data can be analyzed to quickly assess how to make the product more sticky. Feature "experiments" can be run on different customer segments.
  • Reduced operational costs. Cloud technology can theoretically allow for a zero IT footprint on the client site, reducing deployment and support costs. And because SaaS is also usually "self-service" ie. purchased and upgraded directly online, it can reduce sales overhead as well.
  • Access to new markets, such as SME and mid-market customers that increasingly buy only SaaS.
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These benefits are so attractive that every and any product and business model is being re-imagined as SaaS, leading to some great ideas (e.g. Spotify, Coursera, bacon-of-the-month dropped off at your doorstep!). But not every business lends itself intuitively to a SaaS model. Especially if you have years of legacy technology and processes established with an existing customer base, the transition won't happen overnight. There are key questions to answer in each facet of the business.

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"How Would You Feel if You Couldn't Use The Product Anymore?"

5/22/2020

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"How would you feel if you couldn't use the product anymore?" According to growth hacking pioneer Sean Ellis, this is the question to ask to determine your level of product-market fit. In response, you are looking for at least 40% of your customer base who say they would be "very disappointed". This represents user passion.

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Do This 1 Thing For Product/Market Fit

4/16/2020

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Read any article on product/market fit and it will say "Talk to customers and focus on their problems. It took us 2 years but we found our product/market fit and sold for $X!". One thing? Simple! Talk to customers.

​But there's a startling lack of practical guides on how to actually talk to customers to elicit and qualify pain points. And there are so many false pains that you can latch on to in customer conversation if you don't know what you're doing (which may explain why that article invariably says "it took us 2 years to find what customers wanted"). Let's look at the reasons why actually getting to a real customer pain point is so hard, and how to do it right.

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