Zero to Traction: Getting Product to Market Fit Faster

If you had to start over with only an idea, a cell phone, and a laptop, what would your plan be?

This is the start of your website or landing page. It forces you to think through your product or service, your value proposition, and what people need or want to buy.

Your deck should include the following.

What we do?

How we do it better?

Why we do it?

Walk through the process or framework. This conveys credibility and builds trust.

Clearly set expectations for the value and benefit your solution brings.

Deliver the price.

Load my CRM with contacts - friends, family, network, leads

Segment by industry or niche

Create a couple of different segments

Develop a couple of different use cases or themes for buying (test each with drip campaigns)

Create multiple campaigns for testing

Start a drip campaign (voicemail, text, email) - Callaction.co

As you land and work with your early customers, dig deep into their experiences.

Analyze and document successes and failures.

Use these case studies as sales and marketing collateral:

Writing is a great way to think about and refine your product and positioning.

Use this initial flurry of content - blog posts, social media, talks, videos and podcasts, pitch deck, and case studies - as a base to analyze and craft a content strategy.

Once you have a clear content strategy tighten down the message.

Email is still one of the best ways to create engagement and affinity for you and your brand. Email gives you the ability to engage folks that have demonstrated an interest (their opt-in subscription) to what you're doing at scale.

The inbox is everyone's universal base of operations, at least for the foreseeable future. Everyone has an email inbox and nearly everyone checks it daily.

Social media is the town square and you can be the town crier. Where you broadcast your message may change over time, but I currently like Twitter and Linkedin for slightly different reasons. But, in both cases I like to use social media as a way to trigger and tease in interest in how I think about problems, markets, and solutions. My brief snippets also help me to quickly test ideas, themes for problem/solution use cases, and positioning.

Starting thoughts

Exploring ideas

Teasing in content

This is the most essential part of this approach to gaining traction for your new venture. Respond to everyone.

At some point you might not have that luxury, but initially everyone of those responses is an experience that those users will appreciate. This will lead to product feedback, sales, or promotion, either is a big win when no one knows about you yet.

Later, all of this interaction will help you to understand how to grade, prioritize, and scale interactions for maximum return.