2-min Product Marketing: Patagonia's Story, Rows' Homepage, Vercel's Sponsorships, First Round's 4Ps.
Aug 2024, Part 1 release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Explore using your homepage as an ungated freemium version of your product to increase conversions.
Rows is an alternative to Excel and Google Sheets. The company's homepage is the freemium version of the product, which allows every curious user to check out all the features indefinitely without signing up. The product only requests signup when the user tries to use the sharing functionalities.
[2] Choose from these 4 styles of stories - detail, founder, how it works, and values - to sell without sounding "salesy".
Patagonia's birth story revolves around the founder's inability to find suitable climbing clothes in the marketplace. Schlitz beer was floundering in the early 1900s till it embraced the formula of going into great detail about its ingredients and the brewing process in its ads.
[3] For developer tools: Partner with other dev tool companies for sponsored posts where influencers use multiple technologies for whatever they create.
Sponsored YouTube videos where developer influencers talk about their passion projects using different dev tools are becoming a popular paid strategy for driving signups. The interim CMO of Vercel suggests teaming up with complementary dev tool companies to showcase your technology and reduce the cost of sponsorships.
[4] The new 4Ps: Align all your stakeholders for building product strategy by first defining persona, problem, promise, and product together.
First Round Capital's 4Ps work as follows - persona: who benefits from your solution most -> problem: what are their most urgent problems you can solve -> promise: highlight your unique value proposition -> product: details about your product on delivering the promise.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Metrics force you to focus on the middle of a market. You devise boring ideas by focusing on an average set of users. Instead, pay attention to the weird consumers (for example) who exist in the extremes - they drive more innovation than normal ones.
[2] Two counterintuitive lessons on decision-making - (i) It doesn't pay to be logical when everyone's being logical in a situation. This tendency helps when choosing things in scarce supply. (ii) Since there's no real unitary measure of what's important in many situations, what you pay attention to and how you frame it affects your decisions more.
[3] Our attitudes don't drive behavior; the behaviors we adopt drive our attitudes. "Behavior comes first; attitude changes to keep up."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Copying is the way design works
[2] Boom time vs Gloom time startups: Why founders benefit from starting new companies during a recession
[3] Guide: How to find your first ICP
[4] Identifying your organization’s digital products
[5] Retailers Locked Up Their Products - and Broke Shopping in America