(2024-08-23) Gardner Grover Seagulls Elephants Geese

Brandon Gardner talks to Jon Grover about How Red Seagulls, White Elephants and Golden Geese can show you your ideal customer. Inspired by Richard Tripp?

Context: when in convergence/focus mode in your market stage, not in diverge/explore (like before you have any customers to talk to); mainly in b2b.

Make sure you're building a product for the Right customers.

Sort customers on "total recognized revenue so far". (So it accounts for new vs old.)

• (could use other metrics - Contribution Margin?)

Set a bar - they used CAC

• red seagulls are below the bar
  • might be hidden - some group (eg acct mgmt) might be giving free service that makes it worth staying for them, but you're secretly losing money
  • you might justify supporting them because some will become Golden Geese (life-cycle) - that's true, but you can't predict which is which, and you can't change the behavior/outcomes for more than a few (see slide here)
• white elephants have high profit, but are a small market segment ("low categorical significance") - hard to find, hard to replicate, often require lots of customization costs. They may also be power users.
• good margin, high significance -> Golden Geese - these are the target Ideal Customer

We all have a bias for new/shiny -> pivot.

• it's hard to know what the right choice is: see Godin Dip
• focus gets the learning to reach informed optimism.