Kathryn Gould breaks down B2B market entry: pick a specific target customer whose location and traits shape your sales strategy, then build a product that makes money for them, not just cuts costs. Customers will forgive bugs if you're a revenue enhancer.
You talked about the primacy of market opportunity. What does that mean? What do you look for in a great market opportunity?
Yeah. So here's what I always say. I say I'm looking for a target customer with a compelling reason to buy. Now, that seems like a simple thing to say, but it's fraught like, target customer. I should back up one second. I did only B2B. I didn't do consumer. And we can come back to that. But target customer means a target to bulk customer. Like, you have to figure out kind of who they are, where they are, how you're going to reach them. You have to have a way to reach them. They have to have certain characteristics. And if you can kind of figure all that out, that will tell you what your kind of sales and marketing strategy needs to be. This is a little bit like what Steve Blank talked about teaches. And the compelling reason to buy is the product needs to be so good or so compelling to them anyway that they'll kind of do anything to get it, like deal with a lot of bugs, stuff that doesn't work right, pay you some advance money to continue the development. I've had lots of crazy stories like that, but they have to be really compelled. And compelling usually means a revenue enhancer, not just a cost reduction. Cost reducers are fine, but something that gets them more revenue faster is really compelling.
Now, what if there's a company already in that market, an incumbent company? Should that keep you out?
Yeah. This is something I learned over all these years in the venture business. We would always worry about the incumbent, whoever had like a similar product in the market that was a large company. And it's very rare that a startup gets beat by a large company. Mostly they get beat by some other startup down the street who's smarter than they are. So I would spend time looking at my competitors, my startup competitors, not the big companies. They just, they don't have the attitude we do.
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