Yasmeen Turayhi’s research on product marketing and her background launching 200+ products in various industries have helped her understand why market research matters, how to think about your value proposition, and how to build a rock-solid go-to-market strategy. Distilled into her top 10 principles this article wil help you navigate the challenging but rewarding journey of launching your product successfully in the market or re-visiting a lackluster launch.
Product marketing gets in at the early stages at the inception of building products. But, often people who are in the world of building products are overly privileging their logical mind over their emotional way of interpreting the world. What that means is that when it comes to understanding the customer, there's usually a gap in understanding what most people will buy because people shop based on their emotions as opposed to their logic.
I always get "Yeah, we've done feedback." But then when I look at it, it's very highly skewed towards technical, or it's maybe overly skewed towards just marketing. I've seen so many people build brilliant products, especially when you get to like neurotech brain computer interface, really sophisticated, really interesting things. But if people don't understand it, or if they don't really value, it doesn't actually matter how great your product is, right?
Everyone is familiar with Reid Hoffman's famous quote that "if you are not embarrassed about the first about the first version of your product that you've launched, and you've launched too late." Unless you're in an industry like FinTech or health tech where, you don't really get a lot of second chances, you should be launching early. Most of the time, people will just wait until version five, without releasing anything from version one to five. And that means that they are not getting a natural feedback loop from the market.
We want to constantly get feedback loops. Doing it once a year with a customer or even once every couple years is not enough. We need more conversations with customers. Create a customer advisory board. This is critical. I think a lot of times companies say that they are doing customer research, but because it's such a big cost center a lot of times, companies don't see it as like valuable. But of all the things that I have witnessed over my tenure this is the most valuable. Because I've actually spoken to hundreds and hundreds of startup founders across the world, this piece of doing due diligence, and really creating this customer feedback loop is one of the biggest differentiators in terms of success.
You need to understand what pain point you are solving for and how big of a paint point that is on a scale of 1 to 5. What I've noticed over the years of doing this is that if there is a three or lower you're in trouble. Because people are not going to want to pay for your product. It's painful, but rather than wasting a year of your life and investor money and time, know this as early as possible.
