Going to Market? Get Them to Fall in Love
How to Use Our Favorite Go-To Market Strategy: Tribes and Platforms
Going to market is scary, hard, and overwhelming — but also completely exciting and gratifying. How do we get our product out into the world? And what do we do once it’s there?
We recommend a Tribes and Platforms approach, which we have adapted from multiple authors and then added a sprinkling of our own experience to.
First, identify a homogenous tribe — Tribe 1 (T1) — of no more than 5,000 people for B2C sales (or 50 companies for B2B sales) who have a 90% chance of buying your minimum viable product in the next 90 days. At least one of your founders should be a member of this first tribe and this tribe should only have one degree of separation from you.
Your job at this point in your business is to launch your product and make it better, not gain as much market share as humanly possible. So, when you launch your minimum viable product (MVP), reach out directly to T1 and give them discounts, talk to them frequently, and incorporate their feedback.
The goal here is to move from having a MVP to a minimum loveable product, where you get T1 to fall in love with the company/business/product — and we mean actual, obsessive, stars-in-the-eyes, let’s-stay-out-for-another-hour-who-cares-about work/life/family/dog-we-just-want-more-of-you kind of love.
Once you have that good kind of love, then ask T1 the most important question: Who else will obsess over us like this? Who is the most obvious next tribe our company could help? Keep in mind that this could be an entirely new group of people than the company was initially planning to sell to next, and that’s okay. The important thing is that you listen to T1. T1 will be virtually certain about who Tribe 2 should be, and T2 will likely be similar in demographics, but not identical. Sure, we could put in the work to find out who T2 is using the internal team’s intuition, census data, or other mechanisms, but this will take forever and require a lot of assets to come up with the same relevancy of data. It’s much easier to simply use T1 to point to who T2 will be.
The goal with T2 is to get them to obsess over the company the same way T1 does, then ask T1 & T2 who T3 should be. Get T3 to fall in love with the company/product/business and voila! Once this is complete, you will have three Tribes in the company’s pocket — this indicates real traction, revenue, and direction. T3 is where tribe development ends.
The next step is to look and find the common principles between the three groups. If you have data from three different homogenous groups, you can find the common denominator elements that everyone loves about your product, and that is going to be your core value proposition for going after a larger market. And once you start looking at that larger market, it’s an indication that your startup is becoming a real company #winning. Now the company can start thinking about how to take that key sales value and turn your company into a Platform that is available for nearly anyone to use.
Want to talk about this with us? Reach out to hannah@deltaawesome.com.