In some of the product categories that we are working on, they are not necessarily the first-in-the-market type of product, and I understand that. Instead of taking a step back and looking elsewhere, we decided to take a closer look to find space and expand in these crowded markets.
How do we do this? How do we win in an ocean that’s super crowded with largest sharks? How do we compete with few hundred thousand dollars, when compared to $400 million dollars? We just need first-principle thinking.
First-principles thinking: Strategy
Step 1: Define the losing strategy
For us to know what would work for us, we need to first know what doesn’t work for us. This way of thinking helps us make clearer, simpler, and faster decisions.
Here’s what a losing strategy looks like for us:
- Competing and investing money in sales processes, outbound communication, and forced marketing against a large company.
- Building features that helps the sales team sell something to an enterprise company or to build features for help sales people achieve targets.
- Providing a sluggish product with poor user experience. Our competitors do that enough already to users.
- Doing things for instant revenue and customer acquisition (stupidest term I have come across). Nothing forced or paid will last long. You can’t buy user interest with money.
- Be one more email that users love to unsubscribe.
Step 2: Define the winning strategy
Here’s what a winning strategy would look like for us:
- 4x investments in giving back to people and community that revolves around our products.
- Building an opinionated software. Not a customer dominated software. They pay us to make the decisions, not for them to build what they say.
- Provide the world’s fastest user experience, with incredible UX showcasing data that’s essential for the user (goes back to our purpose we mentioned in the Purpose page). Help realize the value our products add to the customer.
- Do things that don’t scale. Invest in customer Buy-in. Not customer acquisition. Let customers “Pay for Value”.
- Write only personalized emails, and content that we know our customer (not customers) will read. Painstakingly write em. Don’t bulk send emails.
Execution: What are we doing about this?
A strategy without execution is garbage. Now that we have the criteria for winning strategy, let’s hop on it and take it for a ride. Here’s what we are doing to stick to the winning strategy. We want to win ultimately, isn’t it? When do we know that we won? Read Winning from the back.
We will follow a bunch of practices that will create a clear definition between a product, and a well thought-out product. Let’s call these practices “Mastering”. It will all connect later as you read. I promise.
What is Mastering?
In simple terms, doing something that is as best as it can be. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a perfect mix of practices, workflows, design that we use/build to provide the best user experience, and to help us find purpose.
What practices should we be mastering?
There are a bunch of things, and these practices follow a simple user journey throughout their lifetime on our product. These practices are mostly common among our products, but will/can/should change for each product. Most practices are user experience oriented.
- User funnels
- Product Pitch
- Onboarding
- Feature adoption
- Feature awareness
We will Master each and every practice one by one, and build the best possible experience to serve our purpose.