(2020-09-18) Akhmechet Gotomarket Strategy For Engineers Defmacro

Slava Akhmechet: Go-to-market strategy for engineers. When you start playing a new game, an expert can easily predict the mistakes you're about to make. It's easy for the expert to do because anyone who doesn't yet have an intuition for the game will make the same class of novice mistakes.

In business, novices make a product nobody wants.

Roughly, a go-to-market strategy is the answer to the question "how will you sell what you've made?"

The definition is almost correct but not quite. This one nuance probably killed more startups than almost anything else.

The problem is that the question implies sequential steps. First you make a product, then you figure out how to sell it. That's wrong. The product and the go to market strategy intricately depend on each other, the way two species may depend on each other in an ecology

At the heart of a go-to-market strategy is a user partition function

partitions the set S into two-- a set of target users U and a set of everyone else E. (Market Segment, Customer Discovery)

The function must have two additional properties.

First, it must be precise

Second, the range of the function must be efficiently computable, and it must be efficiently computable by you

One way to think about it is that all functions that can be expressed using Facebook's ad targeting API are valid user partition functions because they satisfy both criteria

Not all valid user partition functions can be expressed using Facebook's API

Most partition functions are bad, and a bad partition function won't give you startup A-- it will give you a more focused startup B that fails quicker. That's valuable in itself, but not good enough. So we need a way to measure the quality of partition functions.

Let's define a higher order function score, which takes a partition function as an argument and returns and returns a number between 0 and 1. The score of zero means you won't sell anything. The score of one is the impossible platonic ideal-- it means you'll sell to every potential user you encounter

Here is one implementation of score that's very simple. First, make a demo of the product as quickly as possible. The demo isn't the actual product, and it doesn't need to be a prototype. You can make it a Figma design or even a slide deck. All it has to do is communicate the problem and how your product solves it.

Then take a sample of potential users generated by your user partition function. About thirty would do. Call them all and try to get them to pay you. (Solution Interview)

Think of early startup work in two stages. The first stage is generating many (partition_function, demo) pairs and scoring them (Lean Canvas). Once you find a pair with a good score you enter the second stage. In the second stage you abandon everything else and completely focus on the one high scoring pair.

When you design a landing page, you write only for the potential users on your list. They need to land on the page and answer the question "is this for me?" in one second, and then reaffirm the answer with every additional sentence.