Ideal Customer Profile

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) has been the buzz word for Product Marketers off late, and I find a lot of the content describing it is unnecessarily complex. Its really a fairly simple but extremely useful concept that build on your understanding of users personas. Let’s dive into how we can use ICPs to optimize your GTM activities … Continue reading Ideal Customer Profile →

User Personas

What are personas? Personas are fictional users developed to help us understand our real users better. They are a simple, yet powerful way of representing the wants/needs/preferences of a group of your target users.  Why create personas? Personas humanize the insights from your user research and data analysis, helping build a comprehensive picture of of … Continue reading User Personas →

SaaS Enabled Marketplaces

SaaS is now a well understood business model - hosted software, made available on-demand on a subscription basis. Marketplaces are also a common business model - “exchanges” that connect buyers to seller, and take a percentage of the transaction as their fee. They have the ability to generate network effects, and get stronger over time. … Continue reading SaaS Enabled Marketplaces →

Scaling marketplaces, one market at a time

Companies are constantly told that growth is all that matters. For start-ups, growth is priority #1. They are advised that the only thing that matters is the speed of growth.  According to Paul Graham, a good growth rate during a startups time at YC is 5-7% a week! For marketplace startups, this speed of growth … Continue reading Scaling marketplaces, one market at a time →

Solving The Chicken And Egg Problem In Marketplaces

Marketplaces are appealing for entrepreneurs and investors because - at scale - they are very hard to disrupt. But before your marketplace can get to scale, you need to solve the chicken and egg problem - figuring out who to bring first - buyers or sellers; producers or consumers; supply or demand. That’s why building … Continue reading Solving The Chicken And Egg Problem In Marketplaces →

Customer Success Is Key To SaaS Success

We are well into a major shift in how software is consumed. This necessitates changes to how software is developed and sold. Customers used to spend millions of dollars to buy a solution, and millions more to implement it. Vendors recognized most of that money before the customer had a chance to ever use the … Continue reading Customer Success Is Key To SaaS Success →

Symantec Helps Customers and Itself

Years after Symantec made the transition from selling boxed software to downloadable software, they are taking the next step and have now announced the offering of Norton security as a service. They are not the first company to go this route — Adobe and Autodesk have set great examples of how to make this a smooth and … Continue reading Symantec Helps Customers and Itself →