A Product Marketing Strategy to Acquire New Customers
growthramp.ioHi HN!
I'm Jason, founder of GrowthRamp.io. Last April, I began working with Decibite, an early-stage web hosting startup. There's a lot of challenges growing from idea to scale, so I wanted to share my approach to early-stage product marketing for those with less than 1000 customers.
After reading the work of the ad executive Rosser Reeves, I wanted to test his theory on the power of a unique selling proposition (USP). The results were positive. In 6 months, Decibite's annualized revenue went up 127%, monthly traffic up 241%, and organic traffic 331%. In this article I am sharing everything I did to grow Decibite step-by-step. My goal is to give you a do-it-yourself manual of sorts as I know early-stage marketing can be a challenge.
I'd love to hear your feedback (pricing strategy, positioning, go-to-market strategy, etc) and personal experiences when it comes to launching a product. I'm eager to learn from others who've had success getting traction early on.
Thank you so much!
-Jason
Your Gap Analysis process sounds interesting. How did you apply it in this specific instance? Sorry if that's covered in the article, just wanted to know more!
The Gap Analysis helped me get clarity on these five business questions:
Who are Decibite’s customers? How have Decibite acquired customers? How should Decibite be different than its competitors? How should Decibite price their product? To improve their product, where should Decibite focus moving forward?
After talking to Decibite's customers, I found out they are non-technical entrepreneurs. They gave me responses like, "I don't even know the technical side. I don't have the patience to learn the technical side. I’d rather do face-to-face work with the client. I'm all for outsourcing parts of the business you don't like, to do more of what you do like to do." Later on, I used this info to target Reddit's entrepreneur subreddit and use similar messaging on the website.
There wasn't much clarity how they acquired customers in the past beyond finding them on Reddit. Ideally my goal is to construct the customer journey by working backwards. One person mentioned they heard about Decibite in a Facebook Group, but I wasn't able to find which group they mentioned.
Lots of info in the article about how they different from competitors. Tl;dr - I positioned them as "Decibite offers 15% or faster hosting, guaranteed."
As for pricing the product, I found out Decibite was underpricing their hosting products. The business hosting plan was $5 CAD per month (about $3.75 USD). The data showed I could bump this up to $10 USD per month without losing growth, an increase of 167%. The VPS hosting plan was $10 CAD per month (about $7.50 USD). The data showed I could increase this to $25 USD per month without losing growth, an increase of 233%.
Wasn't much clarity on where to improve the product beyond the USP of faster hosting. Most of Decibite customers loved what they were doing. They just needed to improve their positioning and messaging.