Entrepreneurship

One of the key questions for every start-up in the B2B space is the go-to-market strategy and the natural initial focus is always on creating a scalable sales and marketing process. How do I create qualified leads at the right costs? How do I move these leads to opportunities and then paying customers? Can I […]

One of the key questions for every start-up in the B2B space is the go-to-market strategy and the natural initial focus is always on creating a scalable sales and marketing process. How do I create qualified leads at the right costs? How do I move these leads to opportunities and then paying customers? Can I do this with an inbound sales force or do I need to have people on the ground?

While figuring out a scalable maketing and sales approach is important, most start-ups forget that there is the much larger opportunity to have passionate users do the distribution for your company. This usually requires 3 things:

  • A simple product that provides value to a single user within a larger organization
  • A price point for the product that is low enough that a user would be willing to expense this on his personal credit card (the best scenario would be that the product is free)
  • A viral loop built into the product that ideally creates network effects
As soon as enough individuals are using the product within an organization, there will be a tipping point from when on the software is the de-facto standard in an organization and / or you can convince the organization to make it the standard. A lot of education companies (like Piazza or my portfolio company Edmodo) have used this approach very successfully and I would challenge every start-up with a B2B product to think through a similar approach for their own distribution challenge.

 

 

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Version One

It’s been a while since I last wrote publicly about robotics, though it remains a core focus of my time in deep tech. Our previous post on the topic dates back to last July and given how quickly markets and technologies evolve (and how we naturally refine our thinking over time), it feels like the […]