Sudheesh Nair of Nutanix describes how to break into a crowded market: pick a narrow use case like virtual desktops where your MVP solves 80% of the problem for a small segment, then scale globally. He covers the execution challenges startups face when expanding internationally, from POCs to shipping hardware to local operations.
We took a product that was probably like 20% of what we need to do, which was in the context of storage, and again, within the context of storage. We could not do everything that an EMC or HP or Dell does, but we were able to do a few things. So we got that product, we took that product and looked at it and said, is this going to do everything that an HP or EMC or an ADAPT do? Absolutely not. Right. But then we looked for a use case where this solves 80% of the problem. Now, when you take a market and say, I'm not going to address 80% of that market, I'm going to address 20%, but for the 20%, I want to address 80% of that problem within that. Right? MVP. MVP. The use case that we picked was virtual desktops. Now, the problem with that is when you take a smaller market like that, if you want to do big business, you need to go broad, because a virtual desktop issue in New York will be similar to somebody in Bangkok, Beijing or Belgium. So we decided that we will solve a problem really well, but we'll solve it for the entire world. Now, obviously, when you make a decision like that, it's a very difficult problem for a startup company. I learned very quickly that selling, doing poc, shipping hardware into Thailand to Singapore to Belgium, it's not as easy. I learned a lot of useless things like carne and hiring process, car allowance, all of those kind of stuff. But our back office was really pushed. But they did help take that MVP for that one use case and then sell everywhere. That allowed us to be really good at that one use case and sell.
