Repeat after me: I love pricing! Yes it’s true. If you don’t already, you should fall in love with pricing because pricing is one of the great art+science of business. Get pricing right and you can work all kinds of magic in your business.
Most startups pick a price out of a hat without a strategy or process. It’s not surprising since pricing is a relatively esoteric area even in the mainstream of marketing. The pricing literature tends to be
In the simplest terms, competitive strategy is business strategy. All companies face competition. If your company doesn’t have competitors, then you’re not in an interesting market. (Investors get particularly annoyed when entrepreneurs claim they don’t have competitors. It shows a failure to understand business fundamentals.)
Michael Porter has done most of the seminal thinking on competition, and everyone still riffs off his work. With out restating the whole treatise (which would make for an absurdly long blog post and a
There is a difference between users and customers. Miss it at great peril. Understand it and wisdom is yours. Or something profound like that.
Practically, creating distinction between users and customers will help you understand your business better and build a better product. The distinction is simple, but the implications are significant:
Users use your product. Customers buy it.
Let me embellish, at the risk of detracting from an already elegant summary.
More about users…
Users use your product. They register, login, push
In the early days at most startups (unless a VC accidentally dumped $5m on you before you were ready), a handful of people are sitting together in a small cramped space. The barriers to communication are VERY low, and hopefully everyone is engaging with prospects and customers. Information is flowing in a freewheeling and fun way.
But it doesn’t take long, often after the first minimally viable product is shipped, that it becomes necessary for a slightly more formal process
Time to open up the marketing communications box and see what we have to work with. Other posts will go into how you pick tactics and deploy them, but it’s good to start with a basic list. Think of these as the tools in your toolbox or the weapons in your arsenal (if you prefer violent war metaphors).
There are many marketing communication tactics, and this is hardly a comprehensive list. In fact, almost any item on this list could be
