The Tuesday Roundup
Last week’s newsletter focused on the four basic steps to growth: great product, great offer, great customer experience, and market awareness. Today, I’d like to add some context with a resource for each core area.
The first core focus area of growth to hyperfocus on is your product. You have to start with a compelling and differentiated product. For your product to be great, it has to solve a major problem for your niche in a novel way. This is the core of differentiation. But how can you get to the bottom of what differentiates your product? This newsletter from Hema Padhu will help you distill your difference.
Next up is your offer — how you price, deliver and derisk your buying process for the customer. It’s important to remember that you’re not just selling based on the product’s features. You’re actually promising an outcome for your customer. This video from Shopify breaks down how to communicate that value proposition.
The third building block of growth is customer experience. Particularly in SaaS, it’s easy to disregard customer service in favor of focusing exclusively on improving your product, but customer experience is an essential part of retention. Retention will bring sustainable growth. Check out this story of how Eventbrite prioritized customer service from day one.
Customer stories are very powerful. That's how you get the head of product to realize 'Oh no! I don't want people to feel that way at all!
Lastly, you need to get your product out there and increase your market awareness. A major part of market awareness is creating content around your product and how it solves customers’ problems. Emily Kramer has a great newsletter about utilizing content for growth. Blog posts are part of this strategy, but there’s a lot more that goes into content marketing.
Reminder that I’m putting together an ask-me-anything roundup to finish out the year. If you have any questions for me — about starting a company, leadership, or anything else — please submit them via comment, responding directly to this email, or on social media. I’ll answer them (anonymously) in a newsletter to close out 2022.