Truly product-led companies are countercyclical. Even in a downturn, when customers are shutting down or slashing spending, your product or service remains in their stack. You made something they can’t live without.
Love from the market is how the best companies gain ground – in any economic environment. It is the clearest sign of product-led growth. But it doesn’t just happen to you. There’s a playbook for it.
TripleWhale is a smart data platform for ecommerce brands, which unlocks real-time performance metrics that empower brands to make better decisions.
The Triple Whale story is a crash course in product-led growth. Let’s deconstruct their insights and methods for your own startups.
You Can’t Have Product-Led Growth Without These 3 Things
Triple Whale’s growth method, simplified:
1.Find the fast-moving water: Triple Whale identified and quickly jumped into the fast-moving water around new ways that young people want to earn a living.
2.Validate your product promise: The product promise is in fact the first step of finding your product-market fit (a well-known prerequisite for growth), and testing its validity should be done before spending effort on building the product.
3.Set up your iteration machine: See how Triple Whale built an iteration machine driven by:
-Speed
-Lots of small product releases
-Constantly seeking customer feedback and product love.
Find The Fast-Moving Water
When it comes to finding fast-moving water, consumers are the leading indicator. But they’re often followed by small businesses, medium businesses, large enterprises, and finally governments. Everyone who wants to progress gets in the water eventually – but there is a huge advantage to getting there first.
When you find the fast-moving water, you’ll find that you grow a lot faster, even in a downturn. Underlying momentum pulls you forward.
Validate Your Product Promise
The Triple Whale founders had the great starting point of being a representative customer of their own market. In many cases this is the best type of founder-market-fit. But even if you are not your own perfect customer, you have to aggressively test whether the need that you perceive in your market is actually there. Go beyond yourself. Have the courage to check your assumptions and validate that thesis early on.
Build Your Iteration Machine
A dream product only becomes a dream product because the people who use it, love it.
Triple Whale continuously improved their product by building a customer feedback machine. This machine requires two things: 1. Speed. 2. Asking your users: “What do you think?”
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