🌟 How to Unlock Your Growth Market...
4 pivotal strategies for mainstream startup success by Renier Kriel: Quick value delivery, intuitive onboarding, viral features, and community engagement, inspired by successes like Notion and Slack.
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We’ve all been there; You get good prototype/MVP feedback, start iterating the product and attract some early adopters. But now, how do you take this mainstream? Â
Because your product (and sanity) literally depends on it.
This weekend, I was reminded about the whole early-adopter-to-mainstream market dilemma by this LinkedIn post from US product marketing specialist Anthony Pierri.
“Crossing the Chasm”, a term coined by Geoffrey Moore in his book of the same title, refers to the intentional niching down on a specific customer, getting it done well for them and then going horizontal to others. Â
It works well, but sometimes the niche is just not big enough. And when you are building in SA, that is more often the case than not.
So there is another way to do this – skipping the niche altogether and going after the end user trusting that their love for the product would eventually force their bosses to buy it. Â
The first to do this was probably Apple as far back as the 80s – IBM and Microsoft were going after companies and corporates, and Apple went after the end consumer. And it's not uncommon today that a Mac is on the wishlist of many an employee who joins a company.
Modern examples? Slack, Airtable and Notion.
Let’s dive in on a product-led approach to building a startup.
Community-powered PLG
Your product needs to be useful on an individual level. i.e. Notion helps you keep track of personal projects and tasks and they do so without charging you.
When it does this well, you fall in love with it and then start searching how to do specific things and this is where you find the community – in Notion’s case, they used Reddit.
Notion’s team hung around here and helped those that asked, to solve niche problems publicly. This helped them gain a big following and affiliation for the product.
These users loved Notion so much, they literally took the product into their work environment and did all the selling work.
11 years in and Notion is valued at $10bn.
To mimic it you need:
1. Super fast Time to Value (TTV)
Whatever your product does, it should do it for users as soon as possible (with as few as possible steps). That means easy setup, intuitive user interfaces, or the ability to achieve a specific goal with minimal effort. The faster users see value, the more likely they are to stick with the product and recommend it to others.
2. Intuitive onboarding
You essentially want entirely self-service adoption, so new users can just start using the product without any assistance from a sales or customer support team. Usually, that means highly intuitive design, clear documentation, and fully automated onboarding processes. But you can just imagine it as making your product plug-and-play.
3. A viral distribution mechanism
Next, you need to build features that encourage them to get more users. I.e I invite my wife to join me on my family holiday planning Notion board and just like that, they have another user. It works alone, but it works better with others.
4. A community ready to die for you
Easier said than done, but you start by finding your core community and offering them a place to engage and realise value, with your product at the centre stage – Notion started by posting on dev subreddits, then eventually expanded to their own subreddit, which eventually became their customer support.
Then, you need to engage the community in iterating the product – “Hey guys, we just put together this new feature idea, play around with it…”.
The aim is to use your community to construct a highly effective and efficient product, while simultaneously gaining enough users to make your mainstream sale pitch super easy – “Look, 60% of your colleagues are already using it to do X, Y, Z easier, better, faster…”
Got a startup growth hack? Hit reply and let us know (and maybe you get featured here, too).
