COMMON SENSE BUSINESS

Common sense is the least common of the senses!

“It’s a winner takes all market”

“Once we finish building this feature”

“Our customers don’t actually want to talk to us”

“We can only acquire customers as low cost leaders”

“But I do talk to my customers”

“Increasing the price is impossible without huge churn and Twitter meltdown”

“Distributed teams are a win-win”

“Our Engineers are the best of the best”

“There’s no point hiring salespeople”

“We need to spend aggressively to hit our growth goals”

“That might work in other companies, but we’re different”

“There is no way to cut costs without destroying the business”

Principles

Price Strategy

Category Design

Installed Base Health

Centralized Teams

Success Based Investing

Customer Interviews

Go to Market Science > Product

Category Design

Product differentiation isn’t strategy. My best salesperson vs your best salesperson; you’ve raised more VC dollars than me; I’m the cheapest; I’ve got the most features. HARD WORK!

Create a New Category - automatically be #1. You want to occupy a position in the customer's mind, and only one company can be there.

It’s easier to sell a category than a product. Customers self-select.

The company is easier to run! At every level, decisions become more obvious fits or misfits.

Project Management and Code Repos “All-In-One-Place”

…. for Game Developers!

Goldilocks: More powerful than Trello, better UI than Jira.

#1 in SVN

Assembla

Enterprise Cloud Version Control

Price Strategy

Value Pricing: The mid-point between the value you deliver and the maximum the customer could pay. Entrepreneurs typically don’t value price - they do cost or competitor.

Increase Prices: Most SaaS companies price too low. (And almost never increase prices!).

Don’t Grandfather Plans. It’s not a ‘standard practice’, it’s really over-charging new customers to subsidize the existing base.

Evaluate all the Levers. As your business, customer, and product evolves - the dimensions of value change too - regularly evaluate the levers pricing should be applied to.

Thank you!