Find Your Market For Growth Products
Successful growth products can flourish in a variety of market sizes. The key is understanding the business factors within your market to reach customers effectively. Furthermore, it’s important to compare market size and market value to determine where to place your bets.
Working at Integrated Research, we developed security monitoring systems for business-critical services. For example, we supported banking services and trade exchanges to ensure that transactions could be processed. As you can imagine, these are high-value systems that require high-end monitoring to prevent disruption in service.
However, there aren’t many systems that provide these services and the market is very small. That said, the combination of high value and the ability to re-target businesses is very attractive. For instance, you can identify a stock exchange or a telco company and go after them because they are easy to find.
While small markets have specific advantages, one of the challenges they present is geographic dispersion. For example, countries and regions can only support so many banking institutions or financial examples. As a result, you need to figure out how to create growth products that meet the needs of customers in different countries. These customers can also be very demanding and expect you to deliver products that work for them.
Product market fit has a lot to do with success, but it’s just as important to consider company product fit. Said differently, you need a position in the market to stands out from the competition. For example, if you are going to have a presence all over the world, you need to have sales offices in key territories to connect with your customers. In the end, the market’s profitability will always determine the investment required to be successful.
About the speaker
Shaun Clowes is the Chief Product Officer at Metromile, a $200 post Series-D startup that is transforming the car insurance market through user-centered design and data science. Prior to Metromile, Shaun spent 6 years at Atlassian, initially leading product for JIRA Agile (now Jira Software). In addition, Shaun built the growth team to include designers, developers, data scientists and product managers. Shaun's team was one of the first to scale Growth techniques to the B2B and Enterprise software space, bringing a data-driven and rapid iteration approach to optimizing acquisition and retention of users.