Growth Products: Generating Revenue, When To Scale
In my career, I’ve focused mostly on enterprise products. Unlike consumer-facing products, there are different ways that product teams feedback to build growth products. While the engagement process may be different, I’ve learned a few lessons along the way that product teams can use in gauging where to grow revenue and when to start scaling up.
Unlike consumer products, the sales cycle for enterprise products is much longer and takes time to cultivate. As a result, it’s difficult to get timely feedback to inform your product development process. This applies both to customers and your sales team – as it’s critical to understand the needs of both groups.
That said, the most critical task that product teams should solve for is getting users to sign up and maintain retention. Ultimately, engaging users and keeping them active on your platform is the surest way to drive revenue. Most importantly, it’s much less expensive to keep customers on board than it is to go out and find new customers.
One way to drive early adoption and retention for growth products is to provide your early customers with white-glove service.
In other words, you need to hand-hold them every step of the way and make sure that the product is functioning correctly based on its design. For example, I recommend finding three to five customers who share a common interest or product need. From there, you can focus on cultivating their experience to ensure that your product is reaching its maximum potential.
Clearly, this model is not sustainable for growth products if you’re looking to scale rapidly. That said, you’re able to gain invaluable learnings from providing early customers with white-glove treatment. In other words, these early interactions enable product teams to listen intently to user needs. As a result, enhancements can be identified to optimize the product in order to scale it without on-going support.
In summary, I’ve found that getting 10 customers to say “hell yes!” to your product is a clear indicator that you’re doing something right. That said, they shouldn’t be the only 10 customers who understand your product – but it’s a simple model for understanding the impact that growth products can make.