☕ 2-min PMM: Patreon's Founder Pricing, Userlist's Dev Emails, Revolut's Product-Market Fit, Etsy's Differentiation.
April 2024, Part 2 release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Consider offering a 'founding customer' pricing option when you mature as a startup and start to increase prices across plans.
Patreon doubled its margins with a well-sequenced set of pricing increases. Additionally, the company permanently froze pricing packages for its initial set of customers who took a chance on the startup at an early stage. You can do the same or offer a price freeze for 12 months to acknowledge their impact before passing over the price hikes.
[2] Follow these 7 key principles for email marketing aimed at developers to keep them subscribed and grow loyalty.
Userlist believes dev tool companies often neglect email marketing and can fix it by sticking to these 7 principles - share edge cases upfront, be quirky, keep readers up to date, share deep content, stick to a 2-4 weeks cadence, remind them and offer context for your product, and lean on authentic influencers.
[3] Evaluate your target metrics around 4 categories - market, product, benchmarks, design - to determine product-market fit (PMF).
Revolut sells financial products in multiple countries. To ensure adoption and success, the product team studies country-specific PMF target metrics on categories like market (ex: acquisition costs), product (ex: MAP, DAP), cross-industry benchmarks (ex: NPS, LTV/CAC), and individual product design (ex: utilization rates).
[4] Limit the influence of industry benchmarks and performance metrics when they don't align with your core differentiation.
Etsy's brand prioritizes sellers as craftspeople and values the buyer-seller relationship. Unlike Amazon, a feature like two-day shipping is not a realistic choice for Etsy's differentiated marketplace. Similarly, overly relying on gross merchandise sales as a metric ignores the buyer-seller experience.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Traction is the "quantitative evidence of customer demand." It can be as simple as 2 to 3 early customers for an enterprise software's initial traction vs. 100s of 1000s of users for consumer software. You can address technical, market, and team risks easily with traction.
[2] You should prioritize traction and product development equally, and each should get half of your attention - "spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction." Sending a stream of new customers to your product by testing traction channels lets you determine if your product is getting less leaky over time and whether or not the product development strategy is sound.
[3] There are 2 types of unconventional PR - (i) Publicity Stunt: a spectacle (something outlandish) to get media coverage for an uninteresting product launch, and (ii) Unconventional PR: small gestures to turn customers into evangelists, i.e., increase customer goodwill for press coverage.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals
[2] How to make better decisions through research (and when you should go with your gut)
[3] How Stripe validates ideas for new products
[4] Picking the Winners in AI: How investors think about AI companies
[5] The Pre-PMF Guide to Product Management: How to Move Faster and Stop Throwing Away Your Roadmaps