Why Your 'Disruptive' Product Isn't Getting Traction
Why Your 'Disruptive' Product Isn't Getting Traction
Everyone has a product that is supposed to disrupt a market. Very rarely does that actually happen
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Pushing people to do something is incredibly hard.
Whether you're trying to get them to try a new way of doing things, or adopt a new product, changing consumer behaviour is one of the hardest things that a startup has to tackle.
Pushing past early adopters and really forcing change within an industry is tough, and it takes more than just a well-oiled sales machine to do it.
Instead, it requires the right concoction of market insight, tailwinds, ideal persona and strategy to actually break through a market and bend it to your will.
Whilst this is rapidly changing, there are still many markets where technology adoption is low. Every week I see numerous ideas trying to target these markets, yet no one is able to answer how they'll actually be able to change ingrained consumer behaviour.
For example, the construction industry has historically been a tough place for startups, with barely any true winners. Yet, most founders operating in this industry, haven't necessarily done the work to understand why others have failed and instead focus on why their product is 10x better than the incumbent solution (which is typically pen and paper).
As most second-time founders know, it's not always about the product. Building product is almost table stakes in the current software landscape. Instead, it's about optimising distribution and thinking creatively about how you can actually change consumer behaviour.
Understanding a Market
Before you even start building a product, you need to understand the market in its entirety. Most founders take this to mean that they need to get validation for their product. There are numerous stories of founders who have gone out and done 200+ customer interviews to really drill down the problems that customers are facing.
This part is usually table stakes. If you're looking to raise venture capital, this is the absolute minimum you should be doing. Unfortunately, most founders stop here.
However, there's so much more to understand about the market beyond the existing tools and problems that exist. You need to unpick the barriers to change and how to mitigate them, existing GTM strategies that incumbents use, who the buyers and users are within a variety of different organisation sizes and why the current ideology exists (i.e., why do people think the way they do).
The most important piece here is understanding the current reality and why it exists. Most founders think they know this, especially if they've worked in the industry or experienced the problem that they are trying to solve.
Unfortunately, this reality is filled with bias from the founder's perspective. If you're a founder, you're likely predisposed to taking risks, trying new things and thinking critically. The vast majority of people in the world do not share these traits. As a result, your version of reality probably doesn't match 80% of the people in your industry.
As a result, it's important to understand 3rd party opinions about why an incumbent solution is so prevalent, or why there hasn't been any solution to date (if operating in a new market). To not skew the data, make sure that you're talking to people who are new to you or that you don't have much of a prior relationship with. This way, you can get unbiased information rather than people who just want to be nice and supportive towards whatever you're building.
Basically, every response can be bucketed into the following three categories: Risk, Time and Familiarity. It takes time to migrate across to a new product, it can also be risky to do so, especially if sensitive business data is involved, and its also extremely unfamiliar to users meaning they need to learn how to use a new product that has its own terminology, its own workflows and training manual.
People just aren't motivated to learn something new for a job that they probably don't even like or care about, to begin with. In startup land, the vast majority of operators are excited to come to work and are usually adequately incentivised to streamline operations and make things better. Outside of startups, the world moves at snails’ pace. People take weeks to fulfil simple requests and don't care about the quality of work that they produce. Why would they care about your new SaaS product that takes 3 days to onboard, has 10 different product gates and breaks every other week?
You might think your goal is to solve a problem. It's actually to make people care about the solution.
What Are You Selling?
The best way to do this is by understanding what you're selling. Most founders think that they're selling a SaaS solution to streamline X, or to analyse Y. Instead, think about the implications for them if they don't adopt your product.
For example, imagine you're building a cybersecurity product that scans a codebase and highlights any potential vulnerabilities with the product. You're not selling a software product, you're actually selling an insurance policy. As a result, your messaging needs to reflect that.
Far too many founders don't prioritise this earlier in their journey. As mentioned above, superior distribution is what makes a startup win. Finding the exact language required to resonate with your target audience will accelerate this journey for you.
Being able to do this doesn't require any skill, but rather a little persistence on your end to extract more from the customer interviews that you conduct. You need to dig deeper into what they're actually telling you.
For example, if you asked "What other tools have used in the past, and why are you using [insert software name] now?" and they gave you a generic answer, you need to double-click on any vague terms that they use. They might say something like "X product is just better and easier to use", you need to clarify what "better" and "easier" actually mean in their context.
By doing so, you'll be able to really cut through and find the right words that will resonate with your audience. Spending time with your customers is valuable, so make sure you get the most out of it.
Crafting an Early GTM Strategy
A lot of first-time founders are scared of selling. I've met with a number of startups in the last few weeks and the recurring line that gets repeated is "Our sales metrics are a bit low right now, but we'll be hiring a stellar head of sales/sales rep shortly who will be able to accelerate our GTM".
In 99% of the cases, this never actually plays out.
Determining the right GTM approach can be tricky. It's easy to just pick a random strategy that works for others and use brute force to apply it in your market. For example, so many startups try and use PLG in markets where there are long sales cycles in an attempt to shortcut the sales process. Unfortunately, these markets have long sales cycles for a reason. Organisations might be large, with many stakeholders involved meaning a PLG process doesn't actually make sense. As I covered in last week's article, it's important to know when to pivot from your current GTM strategy and try something new.
The best way to start is with founder-led sales, using the language you've gathered through the customer interview phase. If the founder can't sell their own product, then no one can. From early sales conversations, founders will be able to figure out where the sticking points are, and who the key stakeholders are. From here, you can decide whether to double down on an outbound sales motion or switch to product-led sales/product-led growth motions.
Going through this process alone should be sufficient to take you to $1M ARR, if not further. So many founders underestimate the power of founder-led sales, but it's arguably the most important thing they could be doing.
Changing the Market
So far we've largely spoken about how you can understand the market intimately and push past your own biases. Whilst it seems kinda counter-intuitive if your real goal is to change a market, it is a crucial first step.
Change happens progressively over many steps, rather than in one large jump. As such, how you structure these steps are incredibly important.
The best way to do this is just to work backwards from your end vision for where you want the market and your product to be. For example, Canva started off as a simple editing tool, constrained to just images. Over time, the product evolved to incorporate video and presentations and now it's a pretty robust competitor to the Google/Microsoft Suite of tools. But if they had focused on video or docs first, they probably wouldn't be where they are today.
Once you've broken them down into smaller steps, start to align them with different market tailwinds that you've identified. Future product features should only exist if there is a solid tailwind behind them. So many startups forget this after they experience some level of success. Many founders think they are able to bend markets at will once they have a level of PMF, but realistically the journey starts again with every new major product feature added. Ideally, it's a quicker journey to PMF, but you still need to go through the same motions again.
A recent example of this is Meta's launch of Threads. There was a clear tailwind and gap in the market for a better product with Twitter making some large strategic missteps. As such, they accelerated product development and released the app earlier than originally intended. Whilst they were able to get into the hands of 100M+ people by using Instagram's user base, whether the product actually has PMF is a different question entirely, with usage falling off a cliff. How they navigate this and improve user retention going forward will be interesting given the size of their user base.
Parting Thoughts
You need to do the work that gives you the right to create change within a market. It's not meant to be easy to change human behaviour. By checking your bias, and relying purely on anecdotal evidence, the answers on how you can create change will present themselves to you clearly.
Obviously executing on this is another matter, but you need a strong starting point. Skip this step, and you'll undoubtedly flounder around searching for the right language, product and GTM strategy burning valuable time and energy.
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Abhi