Go to Market Strategy Must Watch

If you can’t answer the what then buyers won’t know why.

This is a must watch video for anyone who is in charge of leading the effort of developing a product and launching it into a specific marketplace. What you will see is a founder of a cloud based service bouncing some questions off of successful tech investors Josh Kopelman and Chris Dixon. The advice is almost completely aligned towards how the service is marketed and sold and not much at all about functionality. It underscores the critical importance of making sure you are (a) building something people need or want and (b) have a good idea how to easily let them know you have what they need. And make no mistake about it while the content here is targeted squarely to entrepreneurs the tone of the advice is relevant to just about any product or service regardless of where it is in the lifecycle.

The education for us all begins with the very first question out of the gate, “what is dispatch.io?” Notice that Jesse Lamb, dispatch.io founder doesn’t answer to the question of what it is but rather what it does. Splitting hairs? No not at all. If the question of ‘what is x’ cannot be answered, then it is safe to say that would-be-buyers will have no idea as to why they should consider the service. Especially considering the cacophony that comes across our information channels these days. (NOTE: Jesse did very good job with this interview and the service seems interesting, so in the event that he ends up reading this I feel compelled to let him know as much and take the critique found here as constructive)

Kopelman gets right to that point at 1:15 by answering the question for Lamb, stating that dispatch.io is a platform that enables sharing. It is important to note that even though this statement isn’t exactly dripping with sizzle Kopelman comes to it in an instant. More time and attention given to creating the statement of what dispatch.io actually IS would certainly result in something more visceral and compelling. The point is to make sure that the question of ‘what’ is answered properly, as it could be the most relevant question that anyone crafting a go to market strategy must answer. If ‘the what’ is not easily defined nor understood then maybe there is no ‘why’ as in ‘why would someone buy it.’

As the conversation continues on notice the direction that Dixon and Kopelman take Lamb. By asking questions that help Lamb communicate some of the nuance of the problem dispatch.io is solving they are able to better turn attention to some options that could possibly help dispatch accelerate their ability to draw in new users. Kopelman offers developing a more defined use case that can be marketed against, Dixon suggest zeroing in on the most interested community and keeping focus squarely upon them, and together they suggest methods that could, assuming the first two pieces of advice were followed, result in increasing enough volume to be relevant to the cloud services that dispatch wants to share across.

The ideas begin to flow, and they flow from the spigot of proper identification of problem and viable solution. If neither exists there can be no strategy, and there will be no success.

Photo Credit: Patrick Denker