How to get ahead of 99% of businesses (in 2024)
Talk With The Video
Summary
- Invest heavily in improving your product because a good product can significantly reduce the need for extensive sales and marketing efforts, making them more efficient and almost non-existent.
- Spend more time directly communicating with your customers to understand how you can improve your product, as it is common for founders to overestimate the amount of customer interaction they actually have.
- Continuously iterate your product to maintain its relevance and desirability in the market; successful companies never let their products become static.
- Establish rigorous systems for product iteration and customer interaction to make sales and marketing efforts easier and more effective, as demonstrated by the success of the two largest companies in our portfolio, each exceeding $100 million.
- Great CEOs like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg stay deeply involved in product development throughout their careers.
- A great product aligns closely with consumer desires and has a high product-market fit, characterized by high sales velocity, glowing reviews, low marketing costs, and rapid, frictionless transactions.
- Assess your product-market fit by evaluating customer feedback, the sales process's ease or difficulty, and whether customers are actively recommending your product.
- To improve your product, understand the unmet needs of your market and the size of the customer base that desires what is missing.
- Utilize Sean Ellis's method by asking customers how disappointed they would be if they could no longer use your product; aiming for more than 40% to say "very disappointed" indicates strong product-market fit.
- Aim for a product that solves significant unmet needs for many buyers, offers recurring, high-margin, and high-price transactions.
- Regularly speak with your customers and have your team document these interactions to unearth insights for product improvements.
- Encourage innovation from all levels within your organization, as those closest to the customer feedback are often well-placed to suggest impactful changes.
- Prioritize product enhancements based on customer feedback frequency and potential impact on sales and customer satisfaction.
- Revisit your product backlog every four weeks to align your priorities with any market changes.
- Adopt a mindset of experimentation with your product, testing and learning from each iteration to determine what resonates best with customers.
- Measure your success by the ease of marketing and sales, high customer satisfaction, and strong financial performance, which are all indicative of excellent product-market fit.
- Following this video, take concrete steps to improve your product by assigning ownership, setting a schedule for customer interactions, creating a product improvement backlog, and conducting regular market fit assessments.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest investing your energy in perfecting your product. Here's a simple plan to make your product so good people can't ignore it:
-
Talk to Customers: Spend more time talking to customers directly. Schedule a part of your week to have these conversations. They'll tell you what's great and what's not so you can make the product they really want.
-
Keep Improving: Don't let your product get old. Always look for ways to make it better. Set up a system to check on your product every few weeks and ask, "How can we make this even more awesome for our customers?"
-
Look for What's Missing: Understand what your customers are missing in the market. If you fill that gap with your product, they'll be more likely to buy from you.
-
Listen to Feedback: If your team talks to customers, make sure they write down what they hear. This feedback is like gold—it shows you how to make your product better.
-
Make a List: Write down all the improvements you could make. Order them by what will help most. Put the biggest game-changers at the top.
-
Test and Learn: Don't change everything at once. Pick one improvement, give it a try, and see what happens. This helps you understand what works best.
-
Check Sales and Marketing Ease: If it's easy to sell your product and doesn't need much marketing, that's a sign your product is really good.
Remember, a great product makes everything else easier. If people love what you're selling, they'll tell their friends, and you won't have to spend as much on marketing. So focus on your product, and let it do the hard work for you. It's the smartest move to grow your business and keep your customers happy.
Quotes
"If you have built a sales and marketing machine and you are still not growing fast enough, it is probably because of your product, not your sales and marketing"
– Leila Hormozi
<<<
"You are not spending enough time talking to your customers"
– Leila Hormozi
<<<
"If you want to make something better, ask people what they want"
– Leila Hormozi
<<<
"Learning means that you have a change in behavior"
– Leila Hormozi
<<<
"If you focus on the product, everything becomes easy"
– Leila Hormozi
