New businesses encounter numerous hurdles in fine-tuning their product and developing a viable revenue strategy. You may be planning on raising some capital and juggling the administrative responsibilities of running a business, but your company’s primary goal is to sell your product and make income. However, you will need consumers to achieve that, so how do you persuade someone to take a chance on you?
Last week, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, we assembled a panel of three technology industry experts to tackle that issue. Kate Taylor, Notion’s head of customer experience, Pablo Viguera, Belvo’s co-CEO, and co-founder, and Vineet Jain, Egnyte’s CEO and co-founder were on the panel.
Aside from their collective experience in assisting in the development of successful startups, each of these panelists’ businesses has adopted a unique strategy for revenue generation. Egnyte, content storage, and management platform are more of a pure business sale, whereas Notion, a collaboration and content organizing tool, operates a freemium model before upselling to premium subscriptions with extra capabilities. Belvo, on the other hand, is a financial services API that is supplied to developer groups and monetized when the API is used in products.
According to Viguera, you should not try to do too much with the product at first. Get something out the door and have customers give you feedback. “In the early days, the v1 that you’re releasing, that you’re producing, won’t be anything like what you’ll have two years from now or ten years from now.” So, not only in the beginning but also throughout time, focus on gathering a lot of feedback. “Even if it’s a sophisticated firm, really build in those feedback loops and be very intentional about obtaining feedback,” he said.
At the same time, according to Taylor, you cannot let customer input tug you in too many different directions. You must identify a core of dedicated users and enlist their assistance in guiding the product. “You have to control the distractions since there are so many various ways to utilize the product and so much different feedback you’ll get.” To locate those engaged voices, and the individuals you’ll bring into the circle to assist you to figure out where you need to grow,” she advised.
