Early founders, if you have an initial market of more than a couple hundred companies, you’re doing it wrong. I know you've been pushed by VCs to show your SOM (initial service obtainable market) is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and That. Will. Not. Serve. You.
Most everyone understands the concept of an MVP or Minimum Viable Product. It’s the simplest product you can launch, with the simplest feature set, that you can release and successfully sell.
A Minimum Viable Product relies on a Minimum Viable Market. The greater the differentiation between customers, the more they’ll need different features. That comes out as configuration panels and settings pages and more and more edge cases. That means more code to write, manage and support.
Even more importantly, when you sell to different markets, they have different sales processes. Group One requires buy-in from these three decision makers and is looking for these benefits and Group Two requires other folks to sign off and is looking for other benefits.
Simply put, the things you learn selling to Group One won’t directly transfer to Group Two. And everything you learn this morning should be useful this afternoon, even if that’s just when to say “no”.
At the start of a call yesterday, a client of mine said his market was “web content publishers.” That a lot of different people with a lot of different needs. It wouldn’t matter what he’s building – that’s a bihhhhhg product.
Thirty minutes into our call, his market was updated to:
Web content publishers
WHO have far more text content than video content
WHO have already internally validated that video is highly valuable with a specific numbers
AND have a relatively low editorial bar
We’ve gone from pretty much every web site on the planet to a few hundred. Now he can get to work.
How specific was your initial market? Did you find that over time you defined it more narrowly?
Inquiring minds wanna know!
#startups #gotomarket #gosmallorgohome