Zero to 1: Product Fundamentals for Go-To-Market

Lack of performance (slowness, data loss) destroys the feeling of mastery. The resulting emotional state, I should be in control but I’m not! makes people feel angry.

Follow-up emails and social push notifications should deliver actions that create customer value instead of trying to “educate” your customer on the product. Show don’t tell.

The single-player onboarding experience has to be great, and it should be very easy for people to send invites or share the tool. It’s easier to get a customer who is already willing to send one invite to send five invites than it is to get someone who’s ambivalent to send any at all.

Some questions for you & your team: What are the core workflows of our product? What of those are exceptionally good or novel? What social opportunities (sharing, invites, referrals, app reviews) can we create when people are at an emotional high? How do we want people to feel when they use the product? How might we evoke and amplify those feel

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Reach out to [early adopters] with manual, personal outreach. We should also be ready with some light processes to keep track of our early adopters and provide a high quality experience to them.

Social proof in the form of company logos and/or customer stories tells similar companies and individuals that it’s a tool for them, because people like them use it already. The “cooler” the companies or people you use for product testimonials, the better. People want to feel cool and want to be affiliated with coolness.

The ability of a brand new user to understand and complete the core workflows of a product determines whether your product delivers immediate value to your customers — Day 0 value. If a tool is not useful, people will simply not come back. This is what makes onboarding the most critical part of any growth strategy — successfully onboarded users ret... See more

Positioning uses what people know, to help them understand what they don’t.

It’s critical to start with the right set of early customers to kick off all the self-reinforcing growth cycles we’ve discussed above. You have to start by knowing who your best early customers will be — for productivity/collaboration companies that’s often knowledge workers on remote and distributed teams, and often engineers.

Products that give people a feeling of mastery the first time they use it make people feel especially in control. People love to feel as if they are in control.