By Daniel Martinez, technical entrepreneur, co-founder of treble.ai, a Series A B2B SaaS startup.
As a technical entrepreneur with over eight years of experience, I’ve had many misses. For a long time, I was stuck in a cycle of creating products that struggled to gain traction. This changed dramatically three years ago when I launched treble.ai, a company that contrasted my previous products.
Treble.ai was a platform where businesses could automate their communications through WhatsApp. Sales, customer support and even entire operations could be managed over this messaging app. The platform took off quickly, although it wasn’t without its challenges.
Early on, we would do anything to attract and retain every potential client. If a prospect requested a specific integration, we would hustle to build it in a matter of days. The philosophy was simple: Say yes, and then figure out how to deliver. Over time, this attitude transformed treble.ai into a Swiss army knife of communication that was capable of automating any form of interaction for any kind of business.
At first, our broad approach seemed like a strength. However, as time went on, I recognized that our decision to be everything to everyone was leading us toward stagnation. Customer requests varied greatly based on their respective integrations. Even our salespeople were confused about what to emphasize due to our wide array of offerings, all while operating as a small team.
The turning point came with a strategic shift: a shift toward a singular focus that transformed our business. We understood that a concentrated effort toward one well-defined goal, rather than a scattered approach, would accelerate our growth.
The Product
We made the strategic decision to focus on developing the integration that was generating the most revenue. This meant pouring our resources into perfecting a product that already had a proven track record. Over time, patterns began to emerge, and it became clear what we needed to build to satisfy our customers’ needs. This hyper-focus led to an acceleration in product development as we quickly gained expertise in this specific area.
Certainly, focusing on one specific area can be transformative for any business. Here are some key steps founders or business leaders can follow to align their strategies:
Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
It’s important to identify which segment of your offerings is performing the best. While revenue is typically the most reliable metric, there are circumstances where it may not provide the full picture. For instance, your revenue might be skewed if it’s predominantly driven by a single customer or if you haven’t figured out your pricing model. In such cases, other indicators such as usage metrics or value-driven parameters can provide a more nuanced understanding of success.
Understanding Your Customers
Beyond relying solely on metrics, engaging in direct conversations with your customers is crucial for getting a comprehensive understanding of their needs. It’s essential to identify the specific problems your product solves for them and to evaluate the importance of your product in their daily operations. The conversations you’ll have may lead to discovering completely diverse insights, and certain problem areas may resonate more with you as a leader depending on the context of your business. This context-specific customer feedback is invaluable for directing your focus effectively.
Marketing Power
Our marketing efforts experienced a significant boost as we focused. We crafted a consistent message that revolved around the integration and redesigned our website to emphasize the value of this specific service. We wrote blog posts to provide further insights about the integration, enhancing its resonance with potential customers. This singular focus helped us carve out a niche, which led to significant growth and a robust consumer following.
A fundamental step is crafting a value proposition that highlights the advantages your product brings to the table, incorporating these benefits into potent marketing narratives. Align your content marketing strategy with your product’s focus, employing customer-centric storytelling to demonstrate the problem-solving capacity of your product. Don’t be afraid of leaving out prospects that could use your product. Once you’ve chosen your segment, commit to it entirely. For instance, if your segmentation is industry-specific, incorporate real-life issues from that industry and include genuine customer testimonials in your marketing material. Every marketing effort should resonate with your chosen industry and reinforce your brand’s commitment to addressing its unique needs.
Growth
The essence of any successful strategy is in deciding what not to do. It’s far better to be the best at one thing than merely good at many. The quality of our product and marketing created a positive feedback loop, a flywheel that kept turning and gaining momentum. Our primary source of prospects was word of mouth. The more we improved the product, the more satisfied our customers became, which led to a great number of marketing assets and testimonials.
Capitalizing On Focus
To capitalize on a focused strategy for growth, it’s essential to first understand where your growth is coming from. You need to be able to trust your metrics.
Make bets on which growth loops you’re willing to test and ensure that your team’s efforts are aligned with these new directives. Early on, you can’t rely solely on metrics: Some initiatives will take time to manifest results, and resistance to change can create friction. Therefore, periodically review your content and marketing messages to ensure they resonate with your target segment.
Once you have some signal that a strategy is yielding results, map out your customer journey and identify the feedback loop so you can identify where to focus your efforts for continuous improvement. For instance, if your growth is content-driven, establish processes that leverage your growing customer base from that segment to produce more high-quality, targeted content for these specific customers.
More and more customers came to us through referrals and inbound marketing, making it easier to gather a diverse array of customer feedback to further refine our product. We found that the more specific our focus, the better we understood what a truly great product looked like in the eyes of our customers. Ultimately, our sharp focus and the resulting growth attracted enough customers and revenue to help us secure our Series A funding.
