Are you positioning your early stage startup right?
A startup is constantly changing and evolving to find out that repetitive pattern of profitability and growth in situations of extreme uncertainties. To increase traction they need one crucial thing ‘The right market positioning’. Know the why and how of it.
Let’s hear a short story
A calls itself B and tells C to buy it thinking of D.
Confusing? Well, this is the reality of many early stage startups today.
Of all the early stage startups (so many), very few of us are going to grow and most of us will fail (bitter truth).
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” — Carl Sagan
To create exception, we need to be true to our self. If we don’t scrutinize ourselves from within, it will create a wrong perception to our prospective clients, thus, with any business market positioning is critical, and being a tech founder, I’ve also learnt it, the hard way.
With our biases coming from different segments of Industry, we tend to follow those similar patterns, without acknowledging that Entrepreneurship is new to us, as anything initially was.
What are the Wrongs?
The Big No No
Your startup has more than one customer segment to target? (You’re already confused)
Do you have more than 1 category/problem to solve? (You’re doing too much to handle)
Current Problems
You’ve the right unique product, but clients don’t understand (Either you’re ahead of time or you’re with wrong customers)
Your competitors are growing fast? (You’re in a crowded space)
You’re set with MVP, looking for growth hacks to market?
Unable to capture the right customers for your product? (You’ve traffic but it’s not valuable)
What is that your Startup is missing?
As an early stage startup, market positioning is extremely relevant to you and this is going to define your survival.
Most startups fail initially, as most of the times, they don’t hit the right customers. Even after having the right product.
If the slice you’re trying to cut is not too thin and your startup solves a real problem which somewhere somebody is facing. You could be that winning startup but with the right strategy of market positioning.
Google searches, everything about product management, customer study, would have led you to go ahead with customer traction channels.
But, but, but..
Before all that, there is one essential part you need to set right (How your startup appears to the customers you’re targeting), for if you don’t, your each move would fall apart.
The hard sell will only burn your cash, bring frustration and drift you apart from your startup vision.
Decisions Decisions
- Startups are not traditional businesses, there is no single way to grow and moreover the online space is too crowded for you to make a mark.
- Are you focusing on customer’s perspective, where is your value add, your positioning against competitors? All these questions haunted us.
We’re making educated decisions, how we could go wrong?
The right market positioning is not about just the logo or brand name. It grows much wider to your initial offering. Are you even thinking in the customer’s problem space?
Years back, a music player brand sold way too many devices with a single change in their strategy, removing ‘Batteries Inside’ and replacing it with ‘Ready To Use’ over the pack.
So if connecting all dots, focus is where we as startups mostly fail, too much and too early, never works. Wrong depiction would lead to longer sales cycle (B2B) or extremely less conversions (B2C).
How to set the positioning right?
There is no magic behind, but real, accurate calculations and then trials over and over until you reach that million dollar club.
Following are few eye opening exercises you should rigorously follow to achieve correct branding & market positioning.
- Consumer Problem Space
Teleport yourself and every individual in your startup to consumer’s problem space. List down what each of you think and there you’d get a check on how different it is. Then answer these simple questions.
Why a consumer would buy you?
What is going to be the ROI (Return on Investment) to them?
Jot it down, get clear view and do it for all customer segments you wish to reach. Choose one most closer to your current product.
- Perceptual Mapping
Perceptual mapping is a diagrammatic technique used by asset marketers that attempts to visually display the perceptions of customers or potential customers. Typically the position of a company’s product, product line, or brand is displayed relative to their competition. —Excerpt from Wikipedia
Our small introduction to get you the context on how we did it:
We’re a mobile web app (Progressive Web App) tool, help websites to upgrade under 15 minutes, using plug and play. Few of the key benefits we offer to eCommerce websites for mobile are: Increase in User Conversions, Higher Retention Rate, and ability to engage with every mobile user, without needing a mobile app using Widely.
Now, let’s look at one of the graphs we made.
We’ve mapped eCommerce in 3 categories- Conversions, Retention Rate and Presence for mobile and desktop (We further segmented over the number of monthly active users later on).
After plotting, we could clearly see, where we as a business want to play.
For ex- High Conversions, High Retention and High Presence. This is one space we used to think we could play, but after our customer problem space and perceptual mapping exercise we decided upon two categories.
High Conversions, High Retention, Low Presence (They are actively looking to capture mobile users, usually growing online businesses)
Low Conversions, Low Retention, High Presence (They are desperately looking to correct their numbers, usually offline businesses, playing online)
We’re now going to test these two markets One by One, not together.
- This is one intelligent way to mark down how your customers are looking at you,
- How you should define your every move, being in the customer’s problem area.
- Plotting a graph and positioning against competitors.
- Educate yourself
Five ways to build a $100 million business
This is one intriguing article, follow it by heart. I personally read it many times to not lose focus (Which is very easy with occupied mind) and every time, I learn something new.
All the above concepts are core of building any startup (We also learnt it the hard way, still learning), it’s high time you should do these exercises and decide how your startup should look to customers in their eyes.
It has helped us to rebrand from ProgressHive to Widely. Instead of reaching all, we’re focused, heading straight, going stronger with who we’re and still keeping in mind who we want to be.
Any startup can leverage from these understandings and the early stage would become a seed stage soon. We’re going stronger to become one.
We’re extremely grateful to hear it straight from the experts and most of the knowledge I’m imparting is what we learnt from,
Microsoft Accelerator - Prasanna K and Naveen Ansari,
Founder of Interview Mocha - Amit Mishra and Founder of PlayBlazer - Nikhil Soman
Thanks to Reliance Gennext Hub Accelerator program.
