In order to scale growth products, you need to know your pillars. Specifically, pillars are the things that a company does all the time in order to succeed. For example, Amazon’s pillars could be to have the lowest prices, largest catalog and fastest delivery possible.
Knowing Your Pillars and Flywheel
Now, I did not speak with Jeff Bezos about Amazon’s actual pillars. However, based on their value proposition – it’s safe to say that these areas are very important to their company. Ultimately, pillars are the things you need to think about all the time in order to be successful.
We started brainstorming and held this whole conversation about what actually has made us successful. In the end, this is what we believed were Aceable’s pillars:
- Win or Skip Page One On Google
- Exceed Expectations in Each Market
- Expand Our Catalogue
- Fund Our Future
Understanding Your Company’s Flywheel
The other important thing to understand in order to have scaling growth products are flywheels. Flywheels are something that Jim Collins talks about in Good to Great. Many people think that a company takes over the market because they came out did one thing amazingly well.
However, Jim Collins actually went in and studied these companies. He found that there was never just one thing that led them to success. Instead, it was a series of actions that compounded themselves internally in the company.
This phenomenon is like a flywheel where each action creates more momentum. Ultimately, you take off at some point. So, his analysis basically said that rather than just focusing on one thing, you need to build a series of things in sequence to build up speed.
Coming up with our flywheel was difficult at first. Then, we realized that our pillars are actually part of the flywheel process. That said, there are parts of our flywheel that are confidential. So bear with me – there’s a lot more detail behind all these. I just can’t reveal it all…
- Expand Our Catalogue
- Exceed Expectations In Each Market
- Win or Skip Page 1
- Increase LTV and Reduce CAC
- Fund Our Future
- Repeat
Our plan is to basically repeat the flywheel over and over. At some point in time, we’ll decide we’re done with real estate and go do something else. When we do move on we still want to make that an unbelievable expectation so that people talk about us. We can then expand the market aperture with SEM or a paid marketing campaign. That’s basically the approach that we’ve been taking on scaling growth products.
About the speaker
Erin Defossé is the Chief Product Officer at Aceable - responsible for building, maintaining and executing the company’s product strategy and roadmap. Prior to joining Aceable, Erin was the SVP of Product at Bazaarvoice. Prior to his product management career, he was a spacecraft mission design engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition, Erin is the Founder of The Magellan International School in Austin and was Co-Founder and CTO of Isochron Data. Erin holds a Masters Degree in Aeronautics & Astronautics from Stanford University - and currently lives in Austin.